Hello, I’m Gareth Jameson. I’m an actor and a voice coach from www.londonvoicelessons.com. Here are some tips for working on your voice. Now the key to any accent is to isolate the sounds that are specific to that accent.
So, when I’m talking about a Scottish accent, I’m going to talk about a very generalized Scottish version of the English language, sometimes called Scottish English. There are of course many different accents depending on whether you’re in Glasgow, Edinborough, or Aberdeen. This one is probably what we call a general Scottish accent. Now, the first thing you need to work on is your “R” sound. So, for most Scots speakers, they don’t actually use “rrrr” that we associate. It’d be very rare to hear “murder” with big long R’s. It’s much more common to roll the R just one roll, called a tapped R. Bright red, so I say bright red like that. Or saying words like butter or bird. Notice that it’s tapped, so it’s not “birrrd” or not bird, bird. Also, if you get an L after the letter R, sometimes you’ll have an extra syllable on the word so that girl becomes “girl, girl” and world becomes “world”. The loveliest “girl” in the “world”.
Our next feature is the vowels in bath and laugh are the same as in the vowels in trap and man. So, quite often they are different for other accents, but in this accent they are the same. Bath, laugh, trap, and man. There are little difference: Bath, laugh, trap, and man. Also, the “oo” and “u” vowels are the same. In the UK at the moment, there is a T.
V. commercial with the tag line: “Good with food”. The narrator on the commercial is Scottish, so we hear “Good with food”. They rhyme in his accent, and that’s the same for the “oo” and “u” sounds. So, that hook and pool are “hook” and “pool”. There is no difference between the pull of a rope and the swimming pool. Pool. pool and pull are the same. Pull.
Finally, listen to this phrase which will show you a few more features. It’s not a problem if you haven’t gotten any. It’s not a problem if you haven’t gotten any. Now, this is more to do with dialect than accent and in fact, while you’re researching your accent, it is important to look up any dialect words, any words that are different in that accent than they are for other people. For example, rather of saying not, in Scots speak I might say “Not”. It’s not a problem.
And rather than haven’t, “have any”. “It’s not a problem if you have any gotten any.”.
