I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.
I'm not against accents - my husband's from Lancashire and has a rural Lancs accent. We've just got back from Scotland yesterday, and I love that Highland burr.
Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.
We were doing the same thing. We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us. Nuevo-mexicanos have done it very well for hundreds of years, inventing words where they don't have them. I think the future of our language is where we claim our bilingualism for its utility.
I wouldn't have been able to move to L.A. if I felt I was going to lose my identity as a New Jerseyian. My accent has gotten thicker since I've lived here.
I think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.
This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.
I subconsciously mimic whomever I'm talking to, so I've been mistaken for a Canadian, a South American, and somebody from the West Country.
I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas 'Mike & Molly' deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It's not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he's a lot bluer onstage.
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.
I actually had a cockney accent before I went to drama school. It's softened up a bit.
My Dad was from Liverpool, and he picked it up in the army. He'd often come out with this stuff.
I really got the 'Rhoda' flavor from studying my stepmother, Angela, who's Italian, not Jewish. There's really so little difference between the speech patterns and family attitudes of Jews and Italians in the New York area, anyway.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.
Accents are not for comic relief anymore; they root the character to the place they're from.
I don't really pay attention to which accent I have. I'm in a singular box as an actress.
On my best day, I cannot do Scottish people. I don't even believe that's a real accent, to be honest with you. I think they probably sound like us when they're in the house. It's how they keep people away from them.
Irish is harder to pull off. I know southern people and I really like the midwest, so I can tap into that a little bit. It's easier to sound angry with southern than it is Irish. Yelling Irish you can sound like an angry Leprechaun. I think me screaming like I am going to kill you in Irish doesn't work.
I started out in New York, and New York has a way of countering a Southern accent, naturally; when I moved to Los Angeles for a job, and I just stayed, the dialect out here doesn't really counter, and my Southern started coming back.
You know, I do speak the Queens English. It's just the wrong Queens that's all. It's over the 59th Street Bridge. It's not over the Atlantic Ocean.
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.
Language doesn't seem to be a barrier for me to do films in the south.
I could do an American accent, if I were immersed in the accent, meaning if I were living back in Los Angeles and rehearsing and auditioning the whole time.
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.
