Welcome!

Welcome to Voicing the Past! I’m glad you found your way here. This website is a work in progress, but I look forward to growing and expanding it.

My goal is for this site to be a collection of resources about the spoken word of the past. I’ll begin with a focus on Modern English, which covers the time period from about 1500 to the present day. These resources are aimed toward helping performers reconstruct the spoken word of the past, so that they may more authentically represent historical characters in their work. These resources will be most accessible to those who have a background in accent work and phonetics, such as actors, dialect coaches, and linguists, but I hope they will be of interest to all. They will help you make sense of historical texts and the most recent scholarship, so you’ll be able to use them in designing the speech and accent of your character. Compiling these resources will certainly be a large undertaking, but the database will only grow more and more over time.

In addition to the above resources, I also providing one-on-one and production coaching to anyone seeking to find an authentic voice for their character. I’m willing to meet in person, or via the internet. I am particularly eager to collaborate with fellow dialect coaches working on productions set in the past. Please reach out if this is something that interests you. I’d love to chat about how I could help you.

–Christopher