Accents of the Middle East
Presenters:
Julie Foh
Eric Armstrong
Christopher Corporandy
Welcome to the site for the Accents of the Middle East Panel from the VASTA 2022 Hybrid Conference in Sonoma State University, CA, USA. Here you’ll find resources from the panelists for the 3 accents we covered. All resources are copyright their prospective creators, unless otherwise indicated.
This panel has done research on three accents of English from the Middle East as part of a larger effort to create resources for accents that have been under-documented and to test approaches to accent research. The panel seeks to center native speakers while highlighting information about the cultural context, oral posture, prosody, and characteristic sounds of each accent.
Middle Eastern Accents Panel Presentation (video) — Full Presentation with all 3 accents.
Members of this panel sought out and centered the lived experience and language of native speakers of each accent researched, providing several opportunities for pathways of the researchers and the native speakers to converge. Efforts were made to connect with actors of Middle Eastern descent in order to return the research to the community, as you can see in the video of the panel presentation. The accent research is based on primary sources and aimed at providing nuanced detail (as opposed to generalized stereotypes or impressions), and is representative of evolutions in 21st-century actor training. This workshop furthers VASTA’s mission by providing new research on under-documented accents, in turn providing accent specialists and actors who might need to do these accents for industry projects with free resources.
Egyptian Arabic—Eric Armstrong
Egyptian Arabic ResourcesEgyptian Cultural Notes (PDF)
Audio Resources:
Comma Gets a Cure 1
Dali's Last Hurrah 2
All About Foxes
Coming to Canada (extemporaneous)
Presentation Video
Egyptian Arabic Accent Features (PDF)
Lebanese Arabic—Julie Foh
Presentation Video
Google Slides Presentation (used in the video)
A Lebanese Arabic Accent (PDF)
Assyrian Aramaic and Chaldean-American Midwest—Christopher Corporandy
Presentation Video
PowerPoint Slides (used in the video)
1. "Comma Gets a Cure" is copyright © 2000 Douglas N. Honorof, Jill McCullough, and Barbara Somerville.
2. "Dali's Last Hurrah and All About Foxes" are copyright © 2016 Erik Singer and Knight-Thompson Speechwork, All Rights Reserved, and may be used freely for any purpose without additional authorization, provided the present sentence accompanies the passage in print, if reproduced in print, and in audio format, in the case of a sound recording.