Regional Speech Quotes

At acting school people didn't speak like me. It was all received pronunciation - 'ow now brown cow.'

I've actually, very rarely have I worked in my own voice. I've played, I think, Russian, American, Northern from the North of England. All sorts of different accents I've worked in.

I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.

Those English and Scottish know how to do accents.

My father is from North Carolina, and he got rid of his drawl really fast. He's very much about speaking correctly, enunciating in certain ways.

When I heard Puerto Ricans in New York City, it sounded very strange. And the first time I heard someone from Spain, I thought they had a speech impediment!

I don't speak fluent bumpkin.

Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

You don't do classics with a Texas accent.

I just didn't have time to deliver a Buffalo accent in a day, so I didn't even try it.

What you hear is southern Michigan, not a drawl, but a halting kind of speech where you leave spaces when there shouldn't be any. We take a breath anywhere.

I have cousins in North Carolina who talk in that old Southern style of 'yakking,' if you will. All the black men in my life when I was a boy talked that way, and I love that kind of talk.

I'm very proud of my Southern accent, it's part of me.

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.

It must be powerful language if you canna make oout what the heel it’s goin’ on aboot!

I'm interested in why people talk like they do. Like Boston Irish. It's so laid back. Why is that?

I have the thickest accent of any Nova Scotian you've ever imagined.

I, on the other hand, have a bit of a southern accent.

Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.

I do know Joe Lansdale has the most extraordinary voice you've ever heard in your life in terms of an accent that, when I started doing it, they had to go, 'Whoa, we need less.' But that's how he talks.

I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can't do for some reason are the South African and Australian.

As a Scotsman, my accent can sometimes be difficult for people to understand.

I just love dialects; they're really fun.

But I am Northern myself, and there is a certain rhythm of Northern speech that is very comical: that combination of the choice of language and the speech rhythm, which in itself is very funny.