Best options for learning a British Accent (Received Pronunciation)

February 10, 2023 4:34 PM

I'm an American looking to master a British accent for fun. I'm willing to spend money to do this (up to a few thousand dollars), but if there are cheaper options, I'm open to anything. I came across this course: https://www.etjenglish.com/collections Curious what else there is out there? Any way to practice conversationally with British speakers?
posted by jtothes to Writing & Language (12 answers total)

I met a man at a party a week ago. He had a pronounced British accent, but only on some words. I asked where he was born, and it was not Britain. He said everyone he works with is from the North of England, and it's rubbing off on him.
The best way to pick up an accent is to spend time around people with that accent. It's easy to do an accent, but hard to do one that's really convincing. If you're willing to spend the money, a long holiday in England is a start. I'd also assume that getting a girlfriend or roommate with the desired accent would help.
I didn't know courses like this existed. I'd ask someone from England if the end result on their website sounds good. Lots of people in England affect an accent from a more posh class or area than their own, and this is looked on with distaste if they can't pull it off well. When I was twenty-eight I was introduced to a woman who correctly identified the primary school I attended after hearing me speak one sentence. There's a lot of insane expertise out there.
Obviously if it's just for your amusement and not in England, nobody cares. If you're thinking of an acting career I think this is a great idea.
There are, by the way, hundreds of accents, all quite different, and then there are local dialects, some of which are so different as to essentially be different languages. My (recently deceased) aunt worked for most of her life managing an old folks home in the North of England, a position she held by being one of the last people who was fluent in the local dialect (Geordie) and could communicate with people who basically didn't speak English. (Also a forged nursing certificate, but that's another matter.) So some accents come with a different vocabulary, and Geordie has at least one word ("ee") which is typically only used by women. There's also cockney, which requires an in-depth knowledge of rhyming slang, something I imagine takes years to master.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 8:40 PM on February 10, 2023

A dialect coach can help you with this.

Any way to practice conversationally with British speakers?
An English actor might be up for it. Anyone else and I can see it being a bit awkward.
posted by Adifferentbear at 8:42 PM on February 10, 2023

Back in the 80s I borrowed a bunch of cassettes from the library called "Acting with an Accent by Dr. David Alan Stern". They were pretty good for casual use. I just googled and he sells audio on his website now but your local library might be worth a try too.

Otherwise I'd pick a British comedian that has the accent you're looking for, watch lots of material, and try to repeat it.
posted by mmoncur at 10:15 PM on February 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

British person here. What do you mean by a "British accent"? There are 3 countries in Britain: England, Wales, and Scotland, all with their own traditional accents, and then within those massive differences in dialect and regionality. This means there is no single accent that could be called a "British accent", it's more that "British accent" is a collective noun for dozens of broadly different accents, and hundreds of subtly different one.

You've said Received Pronunciation, which is basically an upper middle class traditional English BBC newsreader accent. Note "English", not Scottish or Welsh, even though they are 2 of the 3 countries that make up Britain.

For a long time BBC newsreaders were considered the standard bearers of how people "should" speak, strange as that might sound. The Beeb has diversified a lot in the last 20 years and you'll hear a lot more regional accents now such as Huw Edwards, who was trusted to announce the death of the Queen to the nation and is audibly Welsh.

But listening to episodes of the BBC news, either from the TV on BBC 1 (live BBC news ) or the radio on Radio 4 and trying to imitate them is still a good way to pick up a demonstrably "correct" English accent.
posted by underclocked at 12:01 AM on February 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

Listen to The Man? David Crystal is a justifiably popular expert on this; his autobiography ‘Just a Phrase I’m Going Through’ –is available as an audio book read by him. My "Middle Class Southern" was always a bit down-market from what the BBC-news used to speak because I didn't want to sound like a [k]nob. My millennial English niblings sound like they've stepped down again despite their expensive education. You might try to make your own britaccent age appropriate? Ben "son of" Crystal shows how the accent has changed over 400 years since Wm Shagsper.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:27 AM on February 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Aside from learning how to pronounce the words as we do, you need to listen to a lot of it. There are more regional accents on British TV and radio nowadays, so you probably won't hear a lot of RP which is not very common but Southern British English is a very similar accent has a lot more speakers. But essentially, listen to BBC Radio 4, watch BBC documentaries, and listen to audiobooks narrated by British authors and podcasts or comedy shows by British people. You can probably set your satnav to have a British accent and it will most likely be essentially Southern British English. For this accent, you could do worse than starting with Prince Harry's recent self-narrated audiobook. He has the right accent and speaks very clearly.

But you definitely need to learn and actively practice if you want to sound close to a native speaker. I know Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Jamaicans and non-native English speakers who have lived here for decades. None of them have absorbed an English accent by osmosis (although I do know people who have an acquired distinctly Scottish accent). It probably doesn't help that British people are used to hearing and identifying a wide range of accents.

I think an actor or acting coach might be willing to practice with you if you pay them. Probably not a regular person.

Finally, as the sort of vibe comes through all the British people's answers, it's worth bring aware that accents are one of the strongest ways that class status is signalled in Britain. This is in addition to marking regional origins. RP and Southern British English are distinctly middle and upper class accents - RP is "posh" and Southern British English is natively spoken in the professional classes in the South East of England. Middle class people can, and very frequently do, have other accents, but working class people would not natively have either accent as a rule, including in the South East. In the North of England any Southern British accent can be considered overtly middle class and "posh".
posted by plonkee at 12:29 AM on February 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

As has been pointed out above, all Brits are exquisitely attuned to accents, and will infer massive amounts of information about your background (usually correctly) as soon as you open your mouth. A half-arsed “posh accent” is the quickest possible way of marking yourself out as a huge, insufferable knob. People will struggle to keep a straight face.

Unless you can pull off sounding like an off-duty Hugh Grant or Richard E Grant with 100% accuracy at all times, never ever try this in the wild.
posted by Grunyon at 1:22 AM on February 11, 2023 [13 favorites]

One other twist, to add to the others mentioned, is that accents also mark the age of the speaker. Nobody sounds like Queen Elizabeth or Charles unless they also grew up in a similar background and at that time for example. Many accents which are iconic from film portrayal (My Fair Lady, The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, etc) aren’t ones you will hear now. So - to have the best chance of sounding convincingly like a British person - you should maybe focus on the way people your age speak.

To do a really good job, you need to be focusing on someone from a particular region, but also of a particular era and with a particular biography.
posted by rongorongo at 2:17 AM on February 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

The best way would be to find a dialect coach. There are plenty around, for actors who need to learn other native and foreign accents. I don't have specific recommendations, but that would be the best way, if you're happy to spend the money.

They will be able to teach and correct you much better than a random-but-willing English person, or most actors. A good accent teacher will not only recognise where you sound right and wrong, but will identify why, and be able to put you on the right track. It might not just be the sound of a vowel, but also where your tongue is at different points, the shape of your mouth, where in your head/nose/throat/chest you're "placing" the sound etc.

RP is still an accent actors will put on their CV - useful for period pieces or posh characters. While there's objectively no "normal" English accent, a general middle-class southern/south-east accent would be the closest in terms of what media and casting would think of as a normal English accent. (Which doesn't mean that's right, or real, any more than non-American actors learning "General American" are actually learning a specific, real, local American accent.)
posted by fabius at 5:05 AM on February 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am an old, double expat who codeswitches between three circum-Atlantic accents (four if you include "mid-Atlantic," mya?). I recommend the following Middlebury-style-CIA-training deep immersion course in mastering a passable british accent.

Carve out a two week period in which you sequester yourself and watch every Mike Leigh film from High Hopes onwards, plus Bleak Moments, Nuts in May, and Abigail's Party, multiple times. Each day, act out key scenes (most of his screenplays are published.) Play all the parts.

Do not interact with any Americans in the flesh during this period. When texting with them, download a british keyboard and use uk spellings and idioms.

After two weeks, call a customer service line for British Airways and ask a simple question, like "I've not got a passport but I'm looking to travel in two weeks, what should I do?" If they ask your nationality, say: "what? Don't I sound British?"

ok mate? Simple as.
posted by Morpeth at 5:43 AM on February 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Students of dialect often study examples from the IDEA archive.
posted by stray at 11:15 AM on February 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

my advice would be to first understand what a "british accent" really means, or as have others pointed out maybe doesn't mean. forgive me for surmising, but probably what are you imagining as a british accent is something like the hugh grant type of accent—comfortably upper middle class, not incredibly posh (i.e. RP like in your title—very very few people talk like this in the 21st century), but firmly planted regionally somewhere in south east england. once you familiarize yourself with the vagaries of class and regionalism across the entire UK then maybe you'd find one of the many british accents as the one you'd like to master.
posted by iboxifoo at 4:01 PM on February 11, 2023 [2 favorites]