Customer Reviews

American Dialects: A Manual for Actors, Directors, and Writers

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This book is a remarkably accurate and knowledgeable way to learn the many American dialects. It is very clear and concise, and would be a great help with the theatre. I spent a lot of time perfecting my New York City accent,and even though a don't do alot of acting it was fun to fool people, & with the help of this book, it worked. An amazing compilation that is clear and focused, it offers an invaluable lesson for anyone that has the time to sit and study it. Wonderful.

An essential tool for any actor who wants to be able to master the regional American accents. Using the international phonetic, this book will guide you through various areas of the USA and allow you to nail down the subtleties of their accent. With this book you'll fool the natives.

I bought this manual to help me when I taught an intensive course for a short term ("J-term" - one week in January) at a secondary school. I used the book when teaching the American Southern dialect, but for most of the kids it was much too detailed and analytical for them. The book contained such a long list of the subtle differences in pronunciation (depending upon region and which consonant precedes or follows the sound) along with all their exceptions, trying to pick out the most important ones to focus on was overwhelming. In retrospect, for this class I could have used fewer, more general guidelines as to the most obvious differences in dialects to focus on. In other words, more drills to practice fewer substitutions. I can see that for a certain type of mind and advanced training for a career in acting, this book would be a good guide, but for my students it was much easier to pick up dialects by listening to them than by memorizing a complex system of substitutions.

As a novelist struggling to learn how to give each character his own voice, this book was a gift from God. Perhaps the most important lesson it taught me was to trust my inner ear. It explained beautifully that dialects, even ones that sound ungrammatical, have their own rules of grammar. It helped me to isolate the particular dialect I was striving to recreate on the page and gave me the courage to use it without apology or explanation. A wonderful source for writers.

This book is an interesting animal. It's apparently a standard for stage dialect instruction (or was, anyway. Paul Meier and David Allen Stern have, I think, taken over this little nook of Theatre instruction), but it suffers from two glaring problems - both of which neither Meier nor Stern fall prey to: one is lack of International Phonetic notation. the International Phonetic Alphabet has been and shall continue to be the standard method of phonetic notation for many, many years. It would not have taken ay extra effort to include a brief tutorial on English phonetic notation. Paul Meier does so in his book, which is also available on Amazon. What we have in this book is this incomprehensible jumble of a notational system that uses far too many digraphs and capital letters (example: the word "caught" in New York is written as "kAWt" in this phonetic system. This example doesn't seem so bad, but when you have multiple dialects and often times very unusual pronunciations of longer words, this system is extremely difficult and inconvenient to use)

Second, and this is something that particularly bugs me, this book is rife with prescriptivist philosophy insofar as language goes. This book goes to great lengths to describe the fine phonological and grammatical details of these dialects, but it's all under the pretense that they're "wrong". Grammatical differences are always treated as "errors", and frequent, almost offensive, assertions are made regarding educational level and literacy, and dialect use versus "proper" English usage. I myself speak with a very thick New England dialect, and am clearly far more educated than the clowns that wrote this book.

The examples of what is given as "proper speech" are also sometimes just ridiculous. The usual ramblings about "ain't" and multiple negation are there, as would be expected. But then there are some really strange, archaic rules listed out, such as using "will" in place of "shall", which is listed as an error, as is saying "it's me" rather than "it's I", and even asserts that this grammatical rule is "threatened" by the sheer popularity of the "incorrect dialectal form". And I kid you not, that phrased really is in the book! Honestly, has ANYBODY ever gone around announcing "it's I" in place of "it's me" in the last six hundred years? Aside from Shakespearean parody?

There are many, many more examples of this sort of thing THROUGHOUT this book. I can't fathom why anybody with such apparent disdain for "improper" speech would go to the trouble of writing a book about dialects and speech varieties. You'd think this book would be titled "Don't Let This Happen to YOUR English" or something like that. It blows my mind that someone could be so descriptive and detailed in talking about something that is also so incredibly wrong and nasty. These authors should be writing prescriptive MLA manuals, not dialect guides.

Now in fairness, the authors DO try to do some justice to the dialects by describing many different little nuanced subsets of broader dialect forms (they include a separate section on the Delmarva Peninsula dialect, for example) and do that quite well. But it's too little, too late. The authors cement themselves from the get-go as being particularly prejudiced against dialect variations as being aberrant or deviant from the "Henry Higgins Standard".

Now on to whether the accuracy of the descriptions themselves, because that's what it really comes down to, isn't it? They're... okay. Just... okay. They're not GROSSLY inaccurate, but I'm NOT gonna say that their descriptions are generally accurate either, because they aren't. They fail to make mention of very obvious Americanisms like "short-A tensing" which is found in various degrees nation-wide, and sometimes incorrectly cross over features between dialects that don't share them - one example being the intrusive-R of New England speech being found in New York speech, which it isn't (while at the same time asserting that a LACK of intrusive-R in New England indicates a stronger dialect, which it most SURELY does not), the listing of the Archie Bunker-ish pronunciation of "thirty-third" as "toidy-toid" as still being current - even in the days of Bugs Bunny cartoons, that pronunciation was seen as parody - the belief that all African Americans say "mon" and "boss" all the time, etc. etc. I could go on and on about this. Its prejudice and presumption would make it seem as though this book were written in the late 40s and placed next to a guide on how to do "Blackface" makeup. But it was written in 1997!

So, to conclude, I honestly don't really recommend this book unless you are a completionist. The book is written with the obnoxious and generally disapproving attitude that all these dialects that the book is describing in such detail are all "wrong". As a consequence, it makes these dialects feel more like they're being described as caricatures, and indeed, I would expect an imitation based on this book to sound very much like a caricature. The descriptions of the kinds of people who speak these dialects are also exaggerated to caricature level. All in all, it's hard to take this book seriously when you read it, unless you're Hyacinth Bouquet from Keeping Up Appearances or Henry Higgins from Pygmalion. The lack of IPA notation nails the coffin shut and robs any sense of authenticity from this book. There are just too many ding-dongs for this book to be useful in serious dialect study.

This book can be entertaining and informative in a "don't let this happen to you" sort of way, but it's certainly not worth any amount of money quoted here.

If you want REAL dialect studies, shell out a bit more money and get Paul Meier's Dialects and Accents for the Stage and Screen, or Stage Dialect Instruction by David Allen Stern. Save this book for Dialect Charades or something.