Southern drawl. Standard British. Canadian, eh. Accents stretch across countries, containing regional dialects. The way people speak can have an impact on their jobs and lives.

  

There are five specific and broad accents within the United States: Western, Midwestern, Southern, Northern and Eastern. The most widespread of those accents is the Midwestern accent, which includes Missouri. Jim Johnson, a professor at University of Houston and one of the founders of Accent Help, an online resource for actors to learn accents, teaches voice, speech and accents in the School of Theater and Dance. Johnson recognizes a divide within the Midwest.

  

“That’s oftentimes called the pen/pin merger,” Johnson said. “I was… getting recordings of people from all of these different parts of the Midwest and the Upper Midwest and the South to sort of track... where it starts to shift to be more Southern and where it starts to shift to be more Northern.”

  

Kylee Daugherty, a psychology teacher at Glendale, says that regional dialects occur when there are changes in the social climate of an area.

  

“It all comes down to regional association, so what areas can you kind of define on a map as having similar cultures, backgrounds, ethnic routes, foods that they like, character traits,” Daugherty said. “Basically, if you can identify some sort of socioeconomic or sociocultural boundaries, there’s probably a regional dialect that falls within that as well, regardless of country.”

  

For Missouri, Daugherty recognizes six dialects: the Bootheel, Kansas City, St. Louis, the Ozarks, mid-Missouri and Northern Missouri. The influences within these areas give them their specific accent.

  

“There’s a lot of Germans and Irish running around this area,” Daugherty said. “That has fundamentally shaped our accent, versus St. Louis, you have much more of an Italian influence that comes into it, so that changes their phrasing a little bit…. Even within the same region, there’s still differences.”

  

To teach people accents, whether through Accent Help or at the university, Johnson provides recordings of native speakers with that specific accent and provides context for the accent. He teaches oral posture, or how to make the sound in the mouth, and the specific intonation needed, which is the pitch and tempo.

  

“With regards to the Midwest..., the sense of the placement is sort of low and back in the mouth,” Johnson said. “There’s a little bit of collapse overall in the space, and it tends to be this sensation of being wide and flat.”

  

There are many stereotypes surrounding people’s accents. Johnson has recorded himself using different accents for studies tracking the bias within them. Although he recognizes the ways people judge the cognition and employment opportunities of people with certain accents, Johnson does not think people in business should worry too much about their accents.  

  

“With professionals in general, I try to talk them out of doing accent coaching because I think they’re much better off putting their energy into their work,” Johnson said.

  

For actors on the other hand, Johnson says it is important to be able to manipulate the voice.

  

“Now for performers…, I think it’s incredibly important that they work on accents [as well as how] they use their voice and how they have ownership over that to be able to speak in different ways and still sound like a connected, grounded human being,” Johnson said.

  

Acting covers a wide range of fields, including theater, tv show and movie. Bill Chott is an actor and comedian from St. Louis, Missouri. He is known for playing Mr. Laritate on the Disney Channel show “Wizards of Waverly Place,” and “The Mailman” on NBC’s “This is Us.” In his experience, learning accents is not as important as developing acting skills.

  

“What they want is to figure out who you are and put you in like a puzzle piece,” Chott said. “Once they figure out how to put you into a puzzle piece, you will fit into every puzzle they need you for. But if you think, ‘I can be everyone!’ Then they’ll always try to stick you in the corner and aren’t quite sure if you’re the right fit.”

  

To Chott, there is one accent that is very beneficial for all actors. For specific roles, there are ways for actors to prepare.

  

“It will help an actor broadly to get down a British accent,” Chott said. “The rest of them, you can only prepare for when it comes your way, and then the only choice is to go to a professional dialect coach. But if it’s sloppy and quick and needs to be done for a comedy sketch… you can go to Youtube.”

  

For student actors like senior Max Lehman, there are many ways to discover accents online. Lehman has played multiple characters with accents for Glendale theater including a Russian accent for Kolenkhov in “You Can’t Take It With You.”

  

“If I really felt the need to really learn an accent like for the play or something like that, I would go online [to] discover different intonations or just the specific dialect that would influence certain letters,” Lehman said. “I would work to replicate that.”

 

Another profession where the way people speak is important is broadcast journalism. Leigh Moody, anchor for KSPR and KY3, started her career in Florida and moved around a lot before coming to Springfield. In the field, young journalists move around to find their desired job, which keeps them from being able to have an accent, unless they know where they plan to stay. In that case, they can have the accent of their audience because they will sound normal for the area.

  

“When you’re younger, you move around,” Moody said. “Your intent is to keep moving up market sizes usually or finding the job you want in the city you want to go to, so it’s not good to have any kind of one accent….”

  

Within the journalism field, broadcasters learn the ways to speak clearly and effectively. There are professionals who will work with newscasters to help them develop their speech.

  

“I know our station offers... a speech coach basically for anything from dialect, accents, also lowering or raising your voice,” Moody said.

 

Anyone interested in learning more about their own dialect can go to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html to take a test. To learn more about how to recreate different accents, visit https://www.accenthelp.com/ or search for tutorials on Youtube.