How to Learn Lines Written in Dialect (Without Tripping on the Spelling)

You open the script and your first line is Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad. By the third read you know what she means, but your eyes are still sounding out letters, and the line won’t stick.

That’s the trouble with lines written in dialect. The playwright has put two jobs on one page: what the character says, and how she sounds saying it. When you try to learn both from the same odd spelling, you end up memorizing the spelling, which is the one thing the audience never hears.

The short version: separate the words from the sound. Make a clean copy in spelling you can read at speed, so you can learn what you’re saying. Mark the sound changes on a second copy, in your own symbols. Then learn the two together, out loud, in the accent, from the very first session. Then test yourself from cues, not the page.

Why respelled lines are hard to learn

Reading a familiar word is fast. Reading menners or gowin is slow, because you have to work out the word before you can think about what it means.

That matters because meaning is how actors learn. Helga and Tony Noice spent years studying how actors memorize, and in research summarized by the Association for Psychological Science, they found that actors learn lines by focusing on what the words mean, not on the words themselves. If your attention is stuck on letters, it isn’t on meaning, and the line has nothing to hang on.

There’s a second problem. A phonetic spelling is the writer’s best guess at a sound, using an alphabet that wasn’t built for it. Even Shaw, who built a whole play around a professor of phonetics, gave up a few lines into Pygmalion. Here’s the flower girl’s first lines, in Shaw’s spelling:

THE FLOWER GIRL. Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’ gowin, deah.

FREDDY. Sorry [he rushes off].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up her scattered flowers and replacing them in the basket] There’s menners f’ yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad.

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, Act I (Project Gutenberg)

At the end of her next speech, Shaw adds a bracketed note: this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned, as unintelligible outside London. From then on her lines are mostly in ordinary spelling. A few pages on she says I’m a good girl, I am, spelled like anyone else’s line, though nothing in the play suggests her accent has changed.

So the spelling was never the accent. It was a hint. That’s your permission to stop learning the letters.

Know which kind of dialect writing you have

Some playwrights respell the sound, like Shaw’s opening for Eliza, or a regional comedy where every was becomes wuz. The words underneath are standard English. Only the spelling has moved.

Others write the dialect into the grammar and the vocabulary and mostly leave the spelling alone. J. M. Synge is the classic case. In the preface to The Playboy of the Western World, he writes that he used one or two words only that he had not heard among the country people of Ireland or in his own nursery. His plays look mostly normal on the page. The dialect is in the grammar and word choice. In Riders to the Sea, Nora says The young priest is after bringing them, meaning he has just brought them.

These need opposite handling. With respelling, you can safely translate the line into standard spelling, because the words are the same. With dialect grammar, you must not. Is after bringing is the line. If you tidy it into has just brought, you’ve learned a different line, and you’ll be fighting your own memory every time you say the real one.

Many scripts mix the two. In Eliza’s lines, menners and mad are respelled sounds, but trod is a word choice: a standard speaker might say trodden. Before you do anything else, go through your part and sort every odd word into one of two piles. Does the spelling change only the sound, or does it change the word?

Make a clean copy for the words

Now type out your part in two versions. The first is the clean copy: every respelled sound turned back into ordinary spelling, every real dialect word and every piece of dialect grammar kept exactly as written. For Eliza, that might read: Now then, Freddy: look where you’re going, dear. And: There’s manners for you! Two bunches of violets trod into the mud. That’s our reading of Shaw’s spelling; if your director or dialect coach reads a word differently, use theirs.

The clean copy is what you memorize the words from. You can read it at full speed, so your attention goes to meaning: who she’s angry at and what she wants.

The second version is the sound copy, and it’s where the accent goes. The coaches Playbill interviewed agree on this part. Joel Goldes, interviewed by Playbill, suggests working from a text you can mark up and marking the sound changes with any symbols that make sense to you. Dawn-Elin Fraser, in the same piece, recommends writing the sound changes down while you make the sounds, in the phonetic alphabet if you know it and in any way that works for you if you don’t.

Hazel Bowers, coaching The History Boys for the Arden Theatre Company, had actors highlight every word in their script that had to change to the correct sound. Do the same: leave unchanged words unmarked, so the marks show exactly where the work is.

For a hands-on method of marking scripts, our guide on how to mark up your script for memorizing covers symbols and layout.

Learn the words and the sound together

With a clean copy in hand, it’s tempting to memorize it in your own voice and add the accent later. Don’t.

Dialect coach Erik Singer, speaking to MovieMaker, calls this a common mistake among less experienced actors: learning the lines without the accent and planning to add it later. An accent isn’t a layer you put on top, he argues. It has to be part of who the character is. Bowers made the same point from the coach’s side: she wanted dialect work done early in rehearsal, so actors take in the sounds while they learn their lines.

So learn from the clean copy, but say every line in the accent from the first session, with the sound copy beside you for checking. Say it out loud, always. In a University of Waterloo study of 95 people, reading material aloud to yourself led to better recall than reading silently, hearing someone else read it, or hearing a recording of yourself. The researchers call it the production effect: speaking and hearing yourself at the same time.

Start slowly. Goldes’s advice is to read aloud slowly at first so your tongue and brain get used to the new sounds, then raise the speed bit by bit. Work one sentence at a time, the way Bowers does with actors.

Test yourself from cues, not the page

Once a speech is roughly in, stop reading it. Rereading feels productive, but it does far less than testing yourself. In a 2008 study in Science, Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger found that once students could recall a word pair, studying it again did nothing for later recall, while testing it again helped a great deal. As Roediger put it in the Washington University release, “Repeated retrieval mattered a lot.”

For dialect lines, testing has a bonus: it takes the spelling away completely. A good middle step is first-letter cues made from your clean copy. Eliza’s mud line becomes T b o v t i t m. There’s nothing to sound out, and you say it all in the accent. Our free line memorizer turns your lines into first-letter cues; paste in the clean copy, not the respelled one.

Offbook builds the same ladder into rehearsal. In the video below, you’ll see how to hide your lines so they blur while the other characters’ lines stay clear, how to switch on memorization cues that show only the first letter of each word or only the first word of each line, and how to hide the entire script for a final test. For a dialect part, start on first letters, then hide your lines, then hide everything, so the last thing between you and the line is your own memory of the sound.

Each time, check two things: the right words, and the right sound. If the words came but the accent slipped, give that line a slow pass with the sound copy.

Keep the accent when the scene speeds up

A dialect line that holds at the kitchen table can fall apart in a scene. Cues come fast, you’re thinking about what you want, and the old vowels sneak back. So rehearse with cues early, while there’s still time to fix what slips.

Offbook reads every other character in a realistic voice, listens while you say your line, and plays the next cue when you finish. If other characters’ lines are respelled too, edit their dialogue into standard spelling in the scene editor so the voices read them smoothly. And if you’re saying a respelled line of your own in the accent and the cue waits too long, switch line detection from Strict to Lenient, or edit your line into the clean copy.

Two more settings help. You can set the playback speed of the other voices for the whole scene or line by line, so a fast exchange can start slow while your accent settles, then come up to speed. And Offbook’s listen mode plays the entire scene aloud, your lines included, which is useful for hearing the shape of a scene on a walk.

If you’re still building the accent itself, our guide to learning an accent for acting covers the sounds and the music, and the one on doing an accent in an audition covers when to use one in the room.

A week with a dialect part

If your off-book date is a week away, this order keeps the words and the sound moving together.

1. Day 1: read the whole play for story. Go through your part and sort every odd word: respelled sound, or real dialect word and grammar.
2. Day 2: type the clean copy and the sound copy. Check unclear words with your director or dialect coach before you learn them.
3. Days 3-4: learn one speech or a few short lines at a sitting from the clean copy, out loud and in the accent, slowly, one sentence at a time.
4. Day 5: test from first-letter cues. Note every line where the words came but the sound slipped, and give those a slow, marked pass.
5. Day 6: run the scenes with cues, your lines hidden. Bring the speed of the other voices up as the accent holds.
6. Day 7: hide the whole script and run it. Then read the original script once, respellings and all, to confirm you didn’t tidy away a dialect word.

That last check matters. Compare what you say with what the playwright wrote, so trod stays trod and is after bringing doesn’t quietly turn into something more polite. If you’d like to practice on the real thing, Pygmalion and The Playboy of the Western World are both in our public-domain play library, and there are more free practice tools for actors on our tools page.

Questions actors ask

Should I learn the dialect spelling or the standard spelling?

Learn the words from standard spelling and the sound from your ears and your coach. Translate only spellings that change the sound. Keep every dialect word and every piece of dialect grammar exactly as written, because those are the actual line.

How do I learn lines written phonetically if I can’t work out the word?

Say the spelling slowly out loud; the word often appears once you hear it. If it doesn’t, ask your director or dialect coach rather than guessing, and write their reading into your clean copy before you start memorizing. A wrong guess learned early is hard to unlearn.

Is it okay to memorize lines first and add the accent later?

Dialect coaches such as Erik Singer advise against it. If you drill the lines in your own voice, that’s the version you’ll learn, and the accent becomes something you have to remember on top. Say every line in the accent from the first session, slowly at first.

Do I need to learn the phonetic alphabet for a dialect role?

It helps, but it isn’t required. Coaches suggest marking sound changes in whatever symbols make sense to you. What matters is that your marks are consistent and that you check them by saying the line aloud.