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Accent Reduction Coach Nicole helps non-native English-speaking professionals speak better English. She provides private coaching, online & live courses.

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The Accent Coach elabora sobre la confianza en los negocios

Claudette Roche es una entrenadora de dialectos que enseña reducción de acento. Enseña acentos extranjeros y estadounidenses a actores y empresarios / ejecutivos. En 2010 fue nombrada como una de los 5 mejores entrenadores de voz por la revista Hollywood Weekly. El negocio, en general, plantea muchas dificultades. Y la confianza de una persona es una de ellas. VERO BEACH, FL, ESTADOS UNIDOS,…

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Techniques to Work On As things go Make an improvement Accent Reduction

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It would have been an odd sight, and sound, to behold.

On an October morning at the Kahanoff Centre in Calgary, dozens of Alberta actors were being put through the paces by dialect coach David LeReaney. They were practising their vowels, studiously paying attention to how they moved their tongues and held their mouths and repeating the word “opportunity.”

Or, as LeReaney wanted to hear it, “Aaaahportunity.”

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This still makes me cry with laughter...

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Sam Chwat, Dialect Coach To The Stars, Dies At 57 : NPR

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Sam Chwat, Dialect Coach To The Stars (And To Us)

March 8, 2011

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Enlarge Universal/Photofest

Sam Chwat worked for three months with Robert De Niro (pictured) before filming started on the 1991 Martin Scorsese film Cape Fear.

Universal/Photofest

Sam Chwat worked for three months with Robert De Niro (pictured) before filming started on the 1991 Martin Scorsese film Cape Fear.

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March 8, 2011

Speech therapist Sam Chwat, a dialect specialist who worked closely with people in business, politics and the film industry who wanted to lose a regional accent — or pick one up — died last Thursday. He was 57. His family told The New York Times that the cause was lymphoma.

Chwat worked with many film stars, including Isabella Rossellini, Danny Glover, Marcia Gay Harden, Willem Dafoe and Olympia Dukakis.

Julia Roberts sought him out, first to lose her Georgia accent and then to regain it for her role in Steel Magnolias. He helped another southerner, Andie MacDowell, after her lines for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan were dubbed by Glenn Close.

Chwat also worked with many business executives who wanted to change their regional speech patterns because they thought it would help their careers. In 1994 on Fresh Air, he told Terry Gross that most clients came to him because they felt that their dialect distracted people from what they were saying.

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"People are listening to how they say their words instead of what they're saying," he said. "This could be deadly if you're doing a commercial. It could be deadly if you're giving a business presentation."

"Other reasons people come is because they find that they're stigmatized as being members of a discriminated subgroup. [They say,] 'I sound too black,' 'I sound too 'New York.' ... Or they feel that parts of their speech make them unintelligible or difficult to understand because most people are expecting standard American speech, which is an easier pattern for most people to understand."

Acquiring A New Voice

Some of Chwat's clients needed to learn an entirely new regional accent for their movie roles. Actor Robert De Niro needed to lose his New Yorker sound and pick up an Appalachian accent for the movie Cape Fear. Chwat worked with De Niro one-on-one in an intense immersion course that lasted several hours a day, five days a week, for almost three months before shooting began.

"We worked very hard and long on that one, and [De Niro] did beautifully," Chwat said. "What you're hearing [in Cape Fear] is mostly vowels that are changed. For example, instead of family, you're hearing a more nasal sound in the 'a.' Instead of the vowel 'i,' which never exists in any part of the South, you have [the sound] 'ah.' These are some of the changes that we went through, word for word, in the script and all through the shooting."

Chwat also worked with regional news anchors to develop what he called "unremarkable ways of speech."

"You want to listen to what they're saying and not how they're saying it," he said. "The most important thing about those people or people who aspire to those jobs is that they don't reveal where they're from; their accents are identifiably American, and you listen to their content and not to their style."

For all his work with high-profile individuals, it was mainly ordinary people — New Yorkers and recent immigrants who wanted to sound more assimilated — whom Chwat helped at the Sam Chwat Speech Center in Lower Manhattan. He employed six speech therapists and drilled clients on their phrasing and conversational speech, making sure they knew how to self-correct themselves midsentence. He also advised all of his clients to smile naturally while talking.

"[If] you use your face while you are speaking, [you] reduce the monotone effect that some people have where their voice is very, very flat," he said. "If we help [clients] throw in a smile or some facial flexibility, their voices will sound more colorful and more interesting and more pleasing to listen to."

Interview Highlights

On picking up an accent inadvertently

"People are adaptable to different degrees. One fact that I'm sure of is that the bulk of your accent does develop between 3 years and 7 years [of age], and is based on where you grow up and among which peers you grow up, as opposed to your parents and what accents they speak. You can think about people in your family or people in your past who were brought up in Europe and have identifiably European ways of speech. If their children were brought up here and were between the ages of 3 and 7, their accents reflect the community they grow up in rather than their parents' accents. People are adaptable after that age, and there is some plasticity and changeability in people depending on how adaptable they are and how long they're in a particular place — and how much they're resisting or trying to blend into the area."

On the pronunciation of humid as 'umid in New York

"In this area, the 'h' disappears before the 'y' sound. So instead of humid and humor and humidity and humanity, we have 'umid and 'umor and 'umidity and 'umanity."

On why he worked hard to get rid of his own Brooklyn accent

"I found that some of my clients were picking up absolutely the wrong cues from me and they were walking out with a New York accent when I needed them to have no accent at all — what I call a 'standard American' accent."

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Annette E Alvarez (MultiEthnicTalent) wrote:

We - Joan C Silverman and Annette E Alvarez or Multi-Ethnic Talent met Sam years and years ago at, I believe, a BackStage actor fest. We became instant business friends. As a managers of diverse talent, some with accents, my first line of defense always included Sam. No matter how busy he was -- he always had a moment for me and my clients. I'm not sure there is anyone out there who can replace Sam. He was passionate about his work and knowledgeble. A combination that many times is hard to find.

Thu Mar 10 2011 08:03:23 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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Cynthia McLendon (Czaerana) wrote:

"Instead of the vowel 'i,' which never exists in any part of the South, you have [the sound] 'ah.'"

I'm a Southerner, and that's news to me! Talk about an over broad generalization.

Thu Mar 10 2011 01:39:58 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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Silvia Wilson (sillama) wrote:

Regional accents are hard to do right. I had an advantage as one grandpa was born and raised on a Colorado cattle ranch, with an accent that was similar to West Texas (brought by cowboys, no doubt). My other grandparents were native Mainers and so am I. Grampa W. said "bob war" when the others said "bahbd wie-uh" for the fencing material.

I cringed when Ann Southern spoke in "The Whales of August" and Tom Bosley tried valiantly to speak Maineglish on "Murder, She Wrote."

Wed Mar 09 2011 18:42:26 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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Matthew Bradley (obrigado) wrote:

– I found it slightly funny that Terry asked about what we call 'up-speak' (making statements that sound like questions) and knew a lot about it and how people perceive it, yet she is probably the one "famous" person I know that speaks in this manner nearly constantly. –

As patronizing and trite as it may sound, native speakers really don’t tend to know anything about the language they speak.

Wed Mar 09 2011 00:22:54 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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Jason Thomas (JakeChickenbiscuits) wrote:

Well, I'm sorry for the loss of Mr. Chawt. However, I ain't gonna lie. I wish that NPR or the local stations would try to hire people with a more regional flair. I get tired of Standard American English.

Also Carl Kassell is from Goldsboro, N.C. how he didn't retain the Eastern Carolina accent I'll never know. (I'm from around those parts too)

Tue Mar 08 2011 23:24:04 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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Rick Adams (Rick_Adams) wrote:

I found it slightly funny that Terry asked about what we call 'up-speak' (making statements that sound like questions) and knew a lot about it and how people perceive it, yet she is probably the one "famous" person I know that speaks in this manner nearly constantly.

Tue Mar 08 2011 20:39:02 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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David Wit (TheInterviewPro) wrote:

I was taken by his comments in the interview about smiling while speaking on the phone and how he could prove that the sound your voice made conveyed your state of mind as much as seeing you frown.

Tue Mar 08 2011 19:58:00 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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Jena Casbon (The_Independent_Clinician) wrote:

As a Speech-Language Pathologist, I am very proud that Sam Chwat was able to achieve this level of success and notoriety in his lifetime. Accent coaching is an interesting and lesser known facet of our profession. Sam will certainly be missed by the Speech-Language Pathology community. Jena http://www.IndependentClinician.com

Tue Mar 08 2011 18:04:19 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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Mark Seibold (MarkArtistAstronomer) wrote:

I can see that many in the south are critical of those of us who imitate southern accents and that they are sensitive to their ‘persnul suth'n aaaksunts’, but really; to those of us on the west coast who are known to speak perfect dictionary English, (hence why we are noted in Portland Oregon as becoming the voice-over capital for the world of English now.) I get people constantly asking me why I am not working as an NPR announcer as I revere those announcers such as Carl Kasell and Robert Siegel and have learned to imitate them quite well. People constantly tell me they think I am the guy on the prime time evening TV announcements for those reality shows [which by the way, I have never seen.] I was lucky to be born with a public radio baritone voice similar to the famed Don La Fontaine as he tells the same childhood story of the vocal chords changing that his mother noticed, which is also quite different than Sam Chwat’s voice.

I enjoyed this great interview that Terry conducted with Sam Chwat and I am sorry for his passing on so young, as my same age. There is much to learn from this interview as to how we speak, especially where he talks of women’s speech inflection routinely going up at the end of sentences and how we can take command when speaking. This also applies to men and how the voice is used from the chest rather than nasal sounding while speaking. Anyone can learn to do this if they so desire to. There is much to learn here and I think the interview should be taken from that respect, and not to demean the southerners varied accents.

Mark Seibold, Retired IT Tech, Artist-Astronomy Educator, Portland Oregon

Tue Mar 08 2011 18:02:33 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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Gregory Scott (Leadbelly) wrote:

Agree with previous posters--I'm sure this man did some fine work, but the DeNiro Cape Fear example simply could not have been one of his finest results with a client. He would have gone out of business quickly. It was one of the least accurate, most uncomfortable and unnatural-sounding affected southern accents I've ever heard. Except from people who are deliberately trying to mock a southern accent.

Tue Mar 08 2011 16:48:16 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)

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I never had the chance to take his workshop on accents when he was here in Winnipeg some odd years ago.

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