107. Messing Around with Accents and Voices (with Kate Fisher)

Improve your understanding of different accents in English, and have fun listening to Kate and me just playing around with different voices.

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Introduction
Have you ever wanted to know how to talk like an American cowboy? (Well of course) Do you know the difference between someone from the north or south of England? Can you recognise accents from Scotland, Belfast and Dublin? What about accents from Australia or New Zealand? Listen to this episode to find out more.

In this episode I am joined by my friend Kate Fisher, who is also an English teacher. Kate and I both love talking in different accents and having fun with voices and characters. So in this episode you can listen to Kate and me doing just that. The main idea is for Kate and me to explore the way different accents sound. We don’t claim to be perfect at all these different accents, it is just fun to try messing around with them, and talking about how the different accents sound to us. Some of these voices we do are not really ‘accents’ as such, but rather types of character that we might have heard in movies or TV shows (e.g. the way cowboys in western movies speak). Listening to this episode is a great way for you to get used to hearing and noticing different accents from around the world.

This episode is another fast one. Kate and I speak completely naturally in lots of different voices. It might be difficult to understand, but don’t forget that I am a fully qualified and well experienced teacher of English and I know what I’m doing! The episode may be quite chaotic when you listen for the first time but listen to the episode several times and you will understand and enjoy it more and more. It’s listening to music. You might not get it the first time, but the more you listen the more you get to know it, and the more you understand and appreciate it. I strongly suggest you try to copy different accents too. This will really raise your awareness of the sounds of different accents in English, and it can be really great fun.

Accents, Voices & Characters
In this episode we talk about (and copy) these accents: (No offence is intended in this episode at all)
-‘Cowboy’
-Standard American
-Yorkshire and Lancashire (North of England)
-Lincolnshire (North/Midlands)
-North and South of England
-South West of England (Bath)
-The voice a buffalo might have (if it could speak English)
-The voice an oak tree might have (again, if it could speak English)
-Some Scottish accents
-Northern Ireland
-Republic of Ireland (Dublin I think)
-Cockney
-Australian
-New Zealand (Kiwi)
I have many more accents and voices which we didn’t talk about in this episode, so there may be more episodes like this in the future.

Please leave your comments and thoughts below, and again thanks for listening to Luke’s English Podcast. If you are American, Irish, Scottish, Kiwi, Aussie, a cowboy, a buffalo or an oak tree, I hope you don’t get offended by this episode at all, and that you realise that Kate and I are just having fun and that we love all your accents very much. As they say, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and I believe it is true.

Best wishes,
Luke