Stoller, whose film credits include working with Carmen Ejogo (as Coretta Scott King) in 2014’s Selma, was effusive in her praise. “I don’t think she sounds exactly like Jackie,” Stoller says after watching clips from the film. “What I think she’s achieved is an absolutely remarkable and very credible, persuasive job of capturing the essence.” …

Is Your Voice Holding you Back?

When a woman tells Stoller she wants to change her voice, she wants to know why. “I want to know, as specifically as they can tell me, what sort of feedback or criticism they’ve received and by whom,” Stoller said. “There are a lot of things you can do that aren’t necessarily going to make someone change their voice so much as use the voice they have more effectively.”

Creating a Community

How did she achieve it? Stoller relates the answer with humorous intensity while her rescue Maltese, Ricky, sits quietly on this visiting columnist’s lap. It’s part of her method: Ricky, she says, is a big help in putting nervous actors at ease. “The first thing I did,” Stoller recalls, “is research Kilbeggan online. I wanted to find oral histories, interviews. … Then I broadened my research for the entire county, Westmeath, and the neighboring county Offaly. The accents don’t change the minute you cross the border. …

Locals and linguists argue that notorious Queens accent is fading away

“It’s influenced by ethnic groups, the people in the neighborhood around you and the social group you hang out with,” said dialect coach Amy Stoller, who said teaching the Queens accent is one and the same with teaching a New York accent. “You think you have a Queens accent because you want to believe you have a Queens accent,” she said.

Taw-kin’ Lawn-Guy-land

“If you really want to hear a ripe Brooklyn accent, you go to Long Island,” says Amy Stoller, a Manhattan-based dialect coach. … Intonations are remarkably specific. “When you think of New York Italian,” Stoller says, “you’re really talking about largely Sicilian and Neapolitan and cadences which are nothing like the cadences of Rome or Tuscany or Milan.”

Learning Dialects: Stoller System

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Accent has to do with pronunciation of the speech at hand. Dialect includes not only accent but all the other linguistic considerations—grammar, syntax, possibly register (formal or informal), and there are also things that shift over time, so that a dialect will differ from one end of a century to the other. Some of the things that I consider when I am doing my research include geographical location, ethnic back-ground within that location,the era in which the play is set, the characters’ social status, and their education level. …

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