Regional Accents Quotes

And instead of getting a pepper-and-salt effect, we find very clear and sharp divisions between the dialects of the United States, which are getting more different from each other as time goes on.

My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.

Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

The notion of 'Queen's English' is usually applied to our pronunciation.

There is a whole host of people that have got an accent like mine, whether they're from Merseyside or Wales or the North West.

You're not from Puerto Rico, so you should say Puerto Rico like all the other people from the place that you come from.

I do play a lot of Southerners because I grew up in the South, but they're still diverse.

I think, for the English accent, we don't say our Rs, contrary to a standard American accent.

Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so.

By county, there's like 14 different accents in Mississippi alone. And now, present day, a Mississippi accent is different than in 1963. So we had a dialect coach, which is like going to visit France and having to translate all your emotions into French, and French isn't your first language. I had to go through that filter, so it was interesting.

I'm from Connecticut, and we don't have any dialects. Well, I don't think we have any dialects, and yeah, it's very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts New England region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail.

I've done a lot of plays before where I had to do a New York accent, but never a Philly one before. They do the rhotic 'r' - where you say the 'r' - where most New Yorkers don't.

Every time I create a character, I don't assume they speak like I do, even if they're Australian.

In the Navy, you're around a lot of people from different parts of the country. They've got different accents, different upbringings. I learned to love country-western music.

I've been banging on about doing stuff in Birmingham for years and years, and everyone says 'We can't, it's the accent thing.' For some reason it's a very difficult accent to get right, harder even than Geordie.

Actually, between Colombian and Mexican Spanish, there's not a huge difference, but it is a different accent.

I grew up being fascinated by accents and dialects. One of the things that interested me were actors that were doing different characters, or sort of more caricatures.

Oh yeah, I'm an Essex boy and proud of it.

I think the hardest accent for me to do is what I end up trying a lot of times, and it's like some sort of a general American sound. So not Southern and not east-coast or west-coast, but just a general American sound that no one really speaks, actually.

When you use a dialect, you worry that the people you're imitating will think you're making fun of them.

I think every English actor is nervous of a Newcastle accent.

I just got back from New York, and I realized in New York, it's very difficult to hear a New York accent. It's almost impossible, actually - everybody seems to speak like they're from the Valley or something. When I grew up, you could tell what street in Dublin someone's from by the way they talked.

It's funny because when I'm outside Australia, I never get to do my Australian accent in anything. It's always a Danish accent or an English accent or an American accent.

I find standard American the hardest. It really fits in a different place in your mouth. Southern, I find the easiest. If you talk to a dialect coach and you get sort of technical, where an English person keeps their voice in their throat, a Southern person does the same, and it's got the same sort of music to talking.