Erik Singer

New video (been working on this one for a while): A tour of North American accents (with special guests!): youtube.com/watch?v=H1KP4z…

Everybody watch City on Fire! First 3 eps out today. Sweeping scope, sharply drawn characters, compelling plot, and great performances!

So happy with how well this show is doing and how well Ramón’s beautiful, sensitive, funny performance is being received

Very nice shoutout from Ramón Rodriguez in the Washington Post on our work together creating Will Trent’s voice and accent. washingtonpost.com/arts-entertain…

@CPharris11 That’s just…how words work. That’s how language operates. The random collections of sounds that make up words don’t have any inherent meaning outside of what you’re describing

Hey @accentvoiceguy there's a word I'm trying to remember but can't and I think you can help. It's when a society or group of people agree on the meaning of a word so it therefore becomes an actual word within that language. "Literally" being an example. What's the word for that-

A few thoughts on whether Austin “still sounds like Elvis.” tldr: around the edges a bit, maybe, but not really; most of what I think people are reacting to has to do with resonance change over time, due to vocal maturity and masses of singing, not accent. vox.com/culture/236726…

Why thank you!

@ZachWeiner gravlax

Suppose you could pick a food and change it so that now it's served like shawarma, in the sense that slices of it are cut from a huge ball then served. What food would be best, what worst?

y’all ever wake up from a dream & be impressed??! like damn, the narrative structure and plot line was amazing 😭😭

Congrats, Austin!!! #elvis #dialectcoach #idiolect instagram.com/p/CnSU-UwOf9X/…

@aa0015f 😉

I like to wonder if @accentvoiceguy have worked with the CIA and we would just never know the answer.

@lawgal09 and that both appear widely across most of the US. This paper by linguist Leslie Barratt is great: inst.at/trans/16Nr/01_…

@lawgal09 More research is needed. My impressionistic sense is that there are some regional patterns to this usage, but the existing evidence shows that the main split is between younger and older speakers, with ‘on accident’ being widespread among those <25 but vary rare among those >50,

@TiloGummel So the non-rhotic speaker’s brain has a sound rule in it that goes like this: “the final sound in ‘father’ = uh. But if the next word starts with a vowel sound (as in “father is”) then it’s uh + R.” And then that same rule gets applied to “India is,” because structurally it’s =

@TiloGummel Well, it’s not Brits trying to sound posh—“intrusive” R is a widespread feature of non-rhotic accents, whether Boston, NYC, Australian, English, or what have you. As to the why: it’s because for non-rhotic speakers, the words India and father (for example) end in the SAME SOUND..

Why do Brit’s trying to sound #posh put an “R” at the end of words ending in a vowel: IndiaRrrr…???? @accentvoiceguy #RishiSunakPM #HappyDiwali_2022

@Gabriel_M_Bland But also consider what everyone else in the show/movie is doing. If you’re doing a period accent and everyone else is doing contemporary accents, that will usually end up sounding weird, in a way that is unlikely to serve the overall piece, unless that specific effect is desired

@Gabriel_M_Bland Find the perfect model

@accentvoiceguy If someone wanted to try to do justice to a super specific sub-type of dialect/accent, any advice? I'm specifically trying to learn how to be true as true as I can to a role: He's a several generations integrated Jewish male in Lake Charles, LA from the 1910's Thx

@mixedlinguist @LingSocAm Ah, this is great. Super well-deserved! Congrats, Nicole!

@itsgeorginamay Phonetically these sounds are [tʃ] and [dʒ]. We have the ever-brilliant @jcwells_phon to thank for the term ‘jod-coalescence’, among many, many other contributions, including the concept of lexical sets, which is invaluable for the study, description, and coaching of accents

@itsgeorginamay But most Brits and Australians have sort of ‘crunched’ (not a technical term 😉) the jod together with the initial consonants, resulting in a CH sound (for ‘tune’) or a DG sound (for ‘dune’). Thus ‘jod-coalescence’—the jod has ‘coalesced’ into the T or D

@accentvoiceguy so enjoy your videos and just stumbled on your Twitter, fascinating! Curious about a difference in “dual/duel”: I say something like “djool”, friends say “dool”. Dune and June sound the same with me. What’s this effect called?