When I worked on Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, I played over forty different characters: Wildlings, Boltons, Stark Bannermen, Maesters-in-training, Nobles, and the everyday people of King’s Landing. And since the geography and culture of Westeros is based on the United Kingdom, this meant I used Scottish, Yorkshire, Manchester, Received Pronunciation, and Cockney accents to bring these characters to life. In other words, five UK accents were enough to create an arsenal of NPCs, with the accent laying the foundation to define each character’s place of origin and socio-economic class from the moment they utter their first words.
This is not to humble-brag, but to illustrate a point: the accent is not the character – if that were the case, I would have maxed out at five. Instead, an authentic accent lays the cultural and linguistic foundation of a fully-realized three-dimensional character. From this authentic foundation, we can then create an infinite number of unique characters within any dialect.
So rather than simply asking, “What makes an authentic dialect?” we should instead ask, “How do I bring authenticity to my characters when using a dialect”?
Competing with Native Speakers
When you audition for a role with an accent, you may very well find yourself competing against native speakers. You might think – and I’ve been here myself – “Why would they hire me if they can just hire someone with the real accent? Should I even audition?”
The reality in casting is that sometimes dozens of native speakers audition, and none of them bring the character to life the way you, a non-native speaker, do. Sometimes your voice simply fits the client’s vision of the character’s sound better than anyone else’s. First, though, your accent has to be believable enough to compete, or you won’t be considered at all, no matter how good your acting or voice is.
Notice I didn’t say “perfect”: you just need to be believable, consistent, and supportive of the character’s circumstances. The accent shouldn’t define the character; it should reinforce it.
As a Marvel fan, I love Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange. While his American accent is far from “perfect”, it is believable enough because it is delivered in an authentic, realistic way. Sure, his /ɹ/ and /æ/ sounds aren’t always quite right, and sometimes his placement and prosody slip into his native RP, but audiences forgive this because his performance is grounded. He’s not trying to “sound American”, he’s becoming the American-accented doctor-turned-Sorcerer Supreme Stephen Strange, and I can’t imagine anyone else – even an American with a native accent – playing the role the way he did.
The same goes for you in voice acting. The client might choose you because of your understanding of the character, your energy, emotional connection, your storytelling, or even your voice. But to even get through the door and into the selects folder, your accent must hold its own beside native speakers. Once you’ve put in the work so that your accent is believable, then it’s your job to stand out and become the character through excellent acting!
What Authenticity Really Means
People often assume native speakers produce a “perfect version” of their dialect. They don’t, because there’s no such thing. In fact, even the concept of a dialect is a bit misleading! Instead, every person speaks with their own idiolect: the unique blend of regional, social, and personal influences that make up their way of speaking.
To make sense of and codify this diversity, linguists group similar idiolects and call this collection a dialect. So, for example, if we take a group of traditionally working-class speakers from East London, we can broadly describe their shared speech as Cockney, a dialect that has evolved and diversified over time. From there, we can make accurate generalizations: most Cockney speakers tend to drop their H’s and swap their th sounds for f or v (“am I bovvered?”) that instantly place a character in Historical or Modern East London.
The mistake many actors make when learning dialects is that they stop at the generalization. They learn the “rules” of the dialect (e.g. “in Cockney you drop your H’s” or “New Yorkers say coffee with a rounded back vowel”), but never learn how real individuals actually speak. The result is often a performance that sounds like a sample from an accent textbook rather than an actual *cough* authentic person.
To find authenticity, you have to go further than the pattern and study how one person from that dialect community really talks: their pace, melody, posture, and even their quirks. The humanity of the character and believability of the accent come from finding the balance between textbook “correctness” and realistic inconsistency. Inconsistency is the next piece of the puzzle, but you can’t just be inconsistent wherever you want. There are rules to the inconsistency! Ok…let’s break this down:
First, let’s imagine dialect work as a toolbox. Inside, you have a wrench, a hammer, a soft mallet, screwdrivers, and pliers. If you need to pull out a nail, the “correct” choice is the back of the hammer (that’s what it was made for). But you could also get creative and use a flat screwdriver to pry it loose, then finish with the pliers. It’s not ideal, but it might get the job done. You definitely wouldn’t use the soft mallet, though! And if you’re trying to remove a Phillips-head screw, your only choice is to use the right size Phillips screwdriver. (And if you don’t have one, well, you’re screwed!)
In dialect work, you have two major toolboxes: sounds (placement, consonants, and vowels) and prosody (intonation, rhythm, and melody). Your job is to make sure both toolboxes contain the right tools for the dialect and that you know how to use them appropriately.
If your native idiolect doesn’t include a certain “tool” (say, a vowel sound or placement pattern), you have to acquire it through consistent practice. For small personal projects, say, an improv bit or a YouTube sketch, you can improvise with what you have and deliver an inauthentic caricature. But if you’re walking into a professional VO session, your client expects you to show up with the proper tools and use them effectively from the start.
Ok, Danny, but WHAT IS AUTHENTICITY?!
Alright, fine, you’ve waited long enough!
In my personal and professional opinion, an authentic character with a dialect requires building a new idiolect for every character you play. With this approach, you’re no longer thinking about a vague category of Yorkshire or Scottish, you’re thinking about how one specific person from Yorkshire or Scotland would actually speak. It’s quite literally the difference between “doing an accent” and embodying an actual human being (fictional or not).
The tricky part is that you have to do all this while acting: you can’t be in your head about vowels or rhythm, you have to trust the work you’ve put into it to live in your body so you can focus on story, emotion, action, intention, truth, and connection. The only way to do this is by practicing while you act — a lot.
So what does it mean to “learn an idiolect”?
Let’s start with the idiolect I know better than any other – my own!
My natural speech blends rural Northern California, casual Los Angeles, and educated General American, with a touch of French and Spanish from a few years living abroad. Add in the influences of being a millennial gamer, a linguistics nerd, and a queer performer, and you get something entirely unique: the Danny Scott idiolect!
Now, let’s look at how I pronounce one simple word: “that”
Sometimes I’ll pronounce the final /t/ with a crisp aspirated [tʰ] (especially when I’m teaching or speaking carefully). More often, I’ll use a glottal stop [ʔ] (“that goes”) or a tapped [ɾ] (“that I”). And if I’m being super casual, I might even drop the /t/ altogether (“that’s so cool!”).
But these aren’t strict rules for “pronouncing the word ‘that’ in Danny Scott’s idiolect”, instead, they are options: tiny adjustments depending on context, emotion, and who I’m speaking to. Once you start listening for these options for all the words and phrases of English and start to see how they work in real speech, you begin to understand that that’s how every real human speaks: fluidly and “imperfectly” responding while using a living toolbox of choices that shift with circumstance (put that on my epitaph!) In other words, the concept of a “correct accent” may be accurate for a dialect textbook, but inauthentic for an actual human being.
Within our own idiolects, we constantly move between careful and casual speech, adapting to who we’re talking to and why. Authenticity in dialect work mirrors that.
So, how do you find that kind of authenticity? Find real people. Use the internet. Watch interviews, vlogs, podcasts, anything that lets you see and hear real speakers whose accents move you (and if you’re like me, save them and make huge YouTube playlists so you can come back to them again and again!) Don’t just listen for vowels; notice their posture, rhythm, melody, and how their emotions shape their speech. Watch their mouth, their teeth, their eyebrow muscle: it all factors in!
Then start building your arsenal, speaker by speaker, idiolect by idiolect. Learn their patterns, their musicality, and their quirks. Once you’ve studied enough individuals, you’ll start to recognize not just the actual rules of a dialect, but the freedom within it. That’s when you stop imitating textbook accents and start building real, believable characters.
And that’s the note I will end on today – performing a dialect with authenticity is not about adhering to the strict ruleset of a dialect, but rather, finding the freedom within it.
(And side note: if you’re serious about dialects and are wondering about all those symbols I used a few paragraphs back, that’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet, the IPA, which will become your best friend!)
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