HIGGINS AND DOOLITTLE

Presents:

HOW TO TALK THE TALK

A Five-Volume Encyclopedic Textbook with Digital Recordings

Illustrating the Dialects and Accents of Spoken English

Volume 1: AMERICAN MEDIA STANDARD:

A Contemporary Pronunciation Guide for Non-Regional American Speech

Volume 2: NORTH AMERICAN DIALECTS:

Regional and Socio-Economic Variants in the United States and Canada

Volume 3: BRITISH DIALECTS:

Upper Class British Standard (R.P.), Middle Class Greater London (Estuary English), Old and New Cockney, and Other Regional and Class Variants in England,

Wales, Scotland, Ireland (Ulster and Eire), Australia, New Zealand,

South Africa, and the British West Indies

Volume 4: EUROPEAN ACCENTS:

English as Pronounced by Native Speakers of Languages from Europe,

Including Spanish and Portuguese Speakers in Latin America

Volume 5: NON-EUROPEAN ACCENTS:

English as Pronounced by Native Speakers of Languages from

Africa, The Middle East, Asia, and Oceania

A BOOK PROPOSAL

by

ROBERT EASTON and ELIZA JANE SCHNEIDER

January 1, 2006

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Hollywood legend Robert Easton, founder and president of “The Henry Higgins of Hollywood, Inc.,” and top voice actress and oral historian Eliza Jane Schneider, founder of “Eliza Doolittle Dialects,” have combined forces as “Higgins and Doolittle” to create their long-awaited master work on dialects and accents from around the world. Professional performers, drama departments, speakers of English as a second language, business executives, acting students, dialectologists, speech teachers, public speakers, raconteurs, and anyone else who wishes to learn to speak with or without a particular accent will find what they need in “How to Talk the Talk.”

This groundbreaking project will distill the wealth of knowledge accumulated by Robert Easton in his 60-year career as a professional performer and dialect coach, and provide the market with Eliza Jane Schneider’s unprecedented collection of high fidelity digital recordings of real-life sources from many different countries and regions. Academically sound, thoroughly detailed, never before published information (see “THE MARKET”) will be presented in the witty writing style of two career entertainers, peppered with colorful anecdotes from and about the celebrities with whom they have worked (see “THE AUTHORS”).

“How to Talk the Talk” will clearly explain the non-regional American Media Standard. It will then illustrate the ways in which other dialects and foreign accents treat sounds and intonations differently. For a particular role, the “correct” speech of the character must be placed in a complex socio-linguistic matrix. A dialect is determined not only by the time and place in which the character was born and raised, but it is also influenced by recognizable socio-economic gradations. “Pygmalion” and it’s globe-trotting musical counterpart “My Fair Lady,” which deal with the contrast between upper-class speech and working-class speech in Victorian London, are successful all over the world in a variety of foreign language translations, because every language (even in “classless societies” like The People’s Republic of China and the former Soviet Union) has clearly defined linguistic class distinctions.

Easton and Schneider treat the idiosyncrasies and variations of all dialects and foreign accents without making pejorative value judgments, thereby helping their students to reproduce the requisite sounds easily and accurately, while avoiding clichés and stereotyping. Whatever the role, the Higgins and Doolittle approach will provide the speaker with the tools to pass as a local.

THE METHODOLOGY

Easton and Schneider have pioneered a unique combination of auditory, visual, and kinesthetic teaching aids, and arranged them in a clear, digestible format. In Volume 1, they provide a linguistic overview and clear analysis of the sound system of the de facto (non-regional) American Media Standard. This will be essential for a clear understanding of the advanced material to be presented in Volumes 2 through 5. Volume 1 will be the template against which to measure differences in dozens of other sound systems. These will range from English language-based dialects to foreign language-based accents from all over the world.

“How to Talk the Talk” will clarify many unfamiliar linguistic principles. This will not only help foreigners to master the intricacies of Standard American “Media-ese” pronunciation, but at the same time it will help performers to reproduce authentic foreign accents.

Speakers of languages that have a clear correlation between spelling and pronunciation, in wishing for their English to be “correct,” will want to sound out every “letter.” In this restoration of “silent” letters, they will proudly say, plum-Ber, ConneCticut, deBtor, Gnome, Honest, Knee, caLm, Pneumonia, chassiS, croqueT, casTle, asTHma, Marine corPS, etc. The same foreigners who want to pronounce every “silent letter” in English words don’t hear that many Americans actually add extra sounds not indicated in the spelling in words like: “lengKth,” “strengKth,” and “warmPth,” etc.

People with foreign accents are constantly confounded by the disparity between our “long” and “short” vowels in clearly related (cognate) words. Why do English speakers say nation, but national; recede, but recession; bible, but biblical; provoke, but provocative; produce, but production; type, but typical? These anomalies can be clearly explained only by an understanding of the “Great Vowel Shift,” which other current works on dialects don’t even deal with.

This new publication will include an extensive description of sounds, employing not only standard dictionary diacritics and International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, but also the unique Easton’s “HALF-FAST” respelling As in “HISS-TREE ‘N’ JOGGER-FEE” (Texas), Or, “WOODEN TIT” be lovely? (England).

The authors will also provide:

• In-depth digital recordings of native speakers from around the world

• Recorded oral, aural, and kinesthetic drill exercises

• Drawings of how to modify lip, tongue, and jaw positions

• Descriptions of phonetics in layman’s terms

• Detailed dialect maps

“How To Talk the Talk” will explain those frequently overlooked subtle dialect and accent variations that are regional, socio-economic, cultural, ethnic, gender-based, and time period specific. For example, the mid-Victorian Cockney dialects in the works of Dickens and Thackeray are very different from the Cockney dialects spoken today. Moreover, a whole new middle class London speech (called “Estuary English) has developed which is intermediate between Cockney and upper class London speech. Most current works on the subject deal only with the two extreme ends of the class spectrum in London. As in the old music hall joke—where the exasperated Duke asks the mumbling Cockney: “My deah fellow, don’t you know the Queen’s English?”

“Oi ‘ad ‘eard she was, yes.”

This work will illuminate other often ignored significant aspects of dialects, such as:

1. Topographical factors which often supercede political or state boundaries. In Southern states from Virginia to Louisiana, the lowland “dropped r” (MAH SISTuhz AH-uhnin’ BOH-wuhd) clearly contrasts with the hill country “hard r” within the same states (MAH SISTerrz AHRRnin’ BOH-werrd). These and other principles will be clearly illustrated in the books by detailed dialect maps.

2. Hybrid forms, or cross-pollenizations i.e. The New Yorican of Spanish Harlem, Jamaican Cockney, New Guinea Pidgin English, Pennsylvania Dutch, East LA Spanglish, Minnesota Swedish, Tex-Mex, French Canadian, etc.

3. Pronunciation of place-names. There are few things that blow a performers credibility more than when he or she mispronounces his or her character’s hometown place-name. Cairo, Illinois; Lima, Ohio; Calais, Vermont; and Versailles, Kentucky (which could be re-spelled KAY-roh, LYE-muh, CAL-lis, and ver-SALES) are pronounced entirely differently from the foreign cities after which they were named (KYE-ro, LEE-muh, cal-LAY, and vair-SIGH).

Studying “How to Talk the Talk” will prevent these and other embarrassing mistakes made by actors and speakers of English as a second language. Such as the Hungarian actress who thought Bob Hope’s theme song was “Tanks for duh Mammaries,” or the pacifist Peruvian who told us she was “praying for piss,” or the French actress searching for happiness who said “I am looking for a penis.”

As practitioners of the “descriptive” school of linguistics (which deals with what the “prescriptive” linguists might consider egregious errors of pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary), Easton and Schneider are interested in the way people actually sound, rather than the way some of the present textbooks on the subject suggest these people should sound. For example, contrary to prescriptive beliefs, some British aristocrats actually say “et” for “ate,” and some American Southern aristocrats actually say “cain’t” for “can’t.”

Easton and Schneider will also explain other basic, essential, dialect-defining principles linguists call metathesis, hypercorrection, the three kinds of assimilation (progressive, regressive, and reciprocal), and phonemic splitting and merging (and their practical applications). A brief, clear explanation of these important principles will provide helpful formulae for how, why, and when seemingly inexplicable inconsistencies within a given dialect or accent occur. These rules will help show why these sounds are produced by the native speaker, and how they can be reproduced by the student.

1. Metathesis, which means rearranging the order of sounds: i.e. “Jesus was crucified on Mount Cavalry,” from the same speaker who refers to “Custer and the Seventh Calvary,” “apern” for “apron,” “childern for children,” reversing the sounds to “pernounce” the prefixes “perserve, pervide, permote, and PREE-vert” or, in the cases of several American presidents, “NOOkyuh-ler” for “nuclear.” Contrary to popular belief, the pronunciation of “axe” for “ask,” as in “axe your girlfriend” is not exclusively ebonic. In fact, this reversal of the s & k sounds was also common in many parts of the British Isles. Many historic English words have metathesized from their original pronunciations. For example, “bird,” used to be spelled “brid” and pronounced accordingly.

2. Hypercorrection. Very often, in many dialects, a speaker who employs sound A for sound B, clearly also employs sound B for sound A. This kind of hypercorrection is prevalent in many dialects where, thinking he or she is avoiding one type of mistake, the speaker makes another mistake in the reverse direction. It explains why the Russian who says, “Vee vill vin duh var,” may also say, “witamins, wikings, wessels, and woo-doo.”

3. Assimilation: Where sounds change under the influence of adjacent sounds. There are three kinds.

   1. Progressive Assimilation, wherein the first sound changes the nature of the sound that follows it. Frenchmen, for example get very frustrated that the letter “d” will devoice to a “t” following the voiceless “p” in “roped,” but will remain a voiced “d” under the influence of the voiced “b” in “robed.” Sacre merde!!!

   2. In Regressive Assimilation, the opposite is true, where the voiceless “p” can produce a regressive voiceless “s” in “noose-paper,” and the voiceless “s” in lobster can devoice the preceding “b” to a “p” sound, as in “lopster.” Other examples of Regressive Assimilation are “tempercent,” where the bilabial “p” changes the preceding alveolar “n” to a matching bilabial “m.” This also explains the “t” sounds becoming bilabial “p” sounds in many American and English dialect pronunciations of the words “foop-ball,” “baskep-ball,” “nope-book,” etc. In middle class English speech (Estuary English) we hear such examples as a “ten days,” but “tem boys” and a “teng girls.” Speakers of Eastern European languages, both Slavic and Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Estonian, & Hungarian) are very prone to such Regressive Assimilations as “steb down,” “Jag Benny,” “figs dinner,” and “I em goink to rodeo to vatch duh whores jump.”

   3. Reciprocal Assimilation, where adjacent sounds mutually influence one another, producing a new sound, different from either one. Examples in many American, English and Irish dialects would include “letcher self go,” “suture self” “have you soldier car?” “pasher plate,” “I’m ‘on mishu, baby,” and “Jeet chet?”

4. Phonemic Splitting and Merging. An example of phonemic splitting: If an American pronounces “morning” and “mourning” as homonyms or puns, he or she cannot assume that an Irish speaker will likewise employ the same vowel in both words (many Irish speakers pronounce “morning” as “MAR-nuhn’” in 2 syllables and “mourning” as “MOWER-nuhn’” in 3 syllables. Likewise, a Charlestonian may employ different vowels in “forty” and “four” (“FAW-dih” and “FOE-wuh”). Even in Standard Media-ese, the same word may have variable vowels, depending on whether or not the word is emphasized. “We CAN do it” vs. “WE can do it” (pronounced like “weaken doo it.” Phonemic merging, on the other hand, may result in unexpected puns. For example, a Japanese voter, merging the phonemes “l” and “r,” and the phonemes “s” and “sh,” may intend to say “on election day, I plan to fight city hall,” and may actually say, “on erection day, I pran to fight shitty whore.”

To top it all off, the “Higgins and Doolittle” approach and methodology presented in “How to Talk the Talk” has the unique distinction of not only having been born of daily questions from our foreign clients, but also having been tried and tested on top stars for roles which have won them Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and Cannes Film Festival Awards, among others.

SURVEYING THE MARKET

Up until now, the available material on dialects has tended to fall into two very different categories. On the one hand, there is highly technical, linguistically detailed material, which is difficult for many non-academics to access and digest. On the other hand, there is a great deal of pamphlet and booklet material, some with tapes or CD’s, available at drama bookshops and on the internet. These are surprisingly superficial and often incomplete.

This new project will bridge that gap. It will provide a five-volume encyclopedic textbook, perfectly suited for perennial use at Universities and professional schools around the world. Constituent chapters may also be released in booklet form, with corresponding compact disks, covering one dialect or accent at a time, to provide a quick crash course for auditions that may come up on short notice.

Those who need to create a broad dialect for a comedy sketch, a stand-up monologue, or an after-dinner speech can quickly find the help they need in these booklets and CD’s. However, for those who have the luxury of time in which to anticipate their future needs, the complete series comprising “How to Talk the Talk” will provide an unparalleled wealth of material, ranging from the technical to the anecdotal. They may delve as deeply as they wish into this gold mine in order to create a wide-ranging repertoire of organically –based authentic dialects.

The best pioneering works dealing with dialects for actors (Phonetic Studies in Folk Speech and Broken English: For use on Stage, Screen, Radio, Platform, and in School and College, by Anne Darrow, 1937; Taking the Stage: Self Development through Dramatic Art, by Charlotte Crocker, Victor A. Fields, and Will Broomall, 1939; and Applied Phonetics, by Claude Merton Wise, 1957) have long since been out of print, and they did not include accompanying records or tapes.

Unfortunately, most of today’s available material on the subject is not as helpful as it should be. The shortcomings seem to fall into five different categories.

1. Oversimplification: Most of the material now on the market is counterproductively superficial. From the mistakes our clients make, we can often correctly name the other projects upon which they have been relying. For example, these projects often make categorical statements to the effect that, “wherever a Standard American speaker would use sound A, a person with a __________dialect would always substitute sound B.” Among other oversights, this fails to explain the concept of hypercorrection, where very often, in many dialects, clearly the speaker also employs sound B for sound A. Old Cockney bus conductors instead of calling out “Hammersmith, Acton Town, High Hoburn, Ealing, and Hampsted Heath,” were apt to say “Ammuhsmiff, Hactontaown, Igh Owbuhn, Healing, and Ampstead Eaf.”

2. Lack of Authentic High-Quality Recordings: Of the existing publications on the subject that do include recordings, most are limited to second-hand stereotypical approximations of dialects and accents, as opposed to first hand recordings of native speakers. Of those recordings that do include some native speakers, few are digital quality, and none provide the range of speakers (including the critical variations of age, ethnicity, gender, education level, and socio-economic status) that will accompany “How to Talk the Talk”. While many people are aware of the class-based distinctions in the London of “My Fair Lady,” most available dialect projects, in their text and recordings, have ignored the obvious class markers in the urban dialects of cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Belfast, Charleston, Dublin, Boston, Glasgow, New Orleans, Edinburgh, Sydney, etc. Certain material is starting to surface on the web, but it is often poorly recorded and has people reading passages in a stilted manner that doesn’t reflect their normal spoken speech.

3. Erroneous Information: Many clients have come to us after they had paid large amounts of money for booklets and tapes that pontificate there is one particular contorted mouth position that will be the magic key to creating all the sounds in a specific dialect. For example, the canard that all the sounds in upper class British English are made way in the front of the mouth might be helpful in moving the American’s long ‘o” forward for a more British sound in phrases like “o¨nly the lonely” or “home alone,” but exactly the opposite is true in a phrase like “Blanche fell on her ass” where the standard American sound is made in the front of the mouth, and the upper class British sound is made way in the back of the mouth-—“BLAHNCH fell on her AHSS”( which also clearly sounds much more elegant).

3. Incompleteness. The authors are constantly asked to teach dialects and sub-dialects that are not included in the materials currently on the market. Films and TV projects based on ever-changing world events now require a much wider range of specific sounds. For example, many otherwise competent performers and coaches confuse the Indo-European based Iranian, the Semitic based Iraqi, and the Asiatic based Turkish accents, creating a potentially offensive “Middle Eastern Mishmash.”

3. Outmoded Concepts: Too many drama teachers and diction coaches are still relying on textbooks rooted in old fashioned “elocution” concepts, a hold-over from the New York “Theatuh” speech of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s, when stage actors did not have microphones. This declamatory style, with its pseudo-British vowels and over-enunciated consonants, was once thought to work interchangeably for British roles and “cultchuhd” Americans who wished to speak with affected “distinction,” in accordance with a self-consciously “upgraded” prescriptive form of speech. This pompous, phony speech won’t get anyone a job in today’s market. Aping Bette Davis, Vincent Price, or Katherine Hepburn is no longer commercially viable in today’s mass media (radio, television, films, and commercials), nor even in the modern more naturalistic theater, and is certainly not representative of today’s “non-regional” or “accent-less” “media-ese” American speech.

RESEARCH:

Or: Walking the Walk in order to Talk the Talk

The unique “Higgins and Doolittle” technique is rooted in extensive personal field research as well as theoretical knowledge. Easton’s private library (the largest private dialect library in the world, now housed in five buildings and three beat-up cars) includes wall-to-wall filing cabinets filled with hand-written phonetic notes made by Easton over a fifty year period, and hundreds of thousands of relevant books: dialect dictionaries, monographs, and linguistic and phonetic academic journals, as well as novels, joke books, poetry, and plays written in authentic dialects by knowledgeable local authors.

Easton’s material is augmented by thousands of digital tapes personally recorded by Schneider. Not only has she driven over 317,000 miles throughout North America, digitally recording a diverse range of dialects in hundreds of communities, across age, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic strata, searching for the true voices of America in all their subtle varieties, but her numerous research trips abroad now include most of the native English speaking countries of the world.

As an experienced oral historian, Ms. Schneider has been able to record dialect speakers spontaneously, expressing their feelings in a wide range of natural emotions. These recordings prove much more helpful to actors than other offerings on the market, in which people have been induced to read written passages, resulting in self-conscious over-articulation, and the stilted intonations of a “reading” style, rather than those of organic natural speech.

It should be reassuring to publishers that she obtained signed legal releases from each of her informants. Schneider’s recordings are in use by other top dialect coaches from coast to coast and teachers at Universities around the world, including Queens University Belfast and the Juilliard School of Drama. Between them, Easton and Schneider have done dialect research on five continents.

THE AUTHORS

Robert Easton Burke was one of the original “Quiz Kids” on radio. At the University of Texas, he took freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes concurrently. Although he had been a severe stutterer and stammerer and had to work very hard to overcome this, amazingly, he became an after dinner speaking champion, winning first place for the University of Texas in every intercollegiate speech tournament they entered him in, one of which included fifty-six universities from Oregon to Florida. Then he moved to Hollywood and became Robert Easton, a juvenile character actor specializ­ing in dialect roles. In 1970, “Show” magazine chose him as one of America’s top twelve character actors. From 1999 to 2003, he served as one of the two performer governors of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, having earlier served both the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in various Vice-Presidencies. Easton also belongs to The American Dialect Society, various British dialect societies, British Equity, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For over half a century, he’s done many different dialects on over 1200 radio programs (on five continents), over 800 television roles internationally, and has appeared in 75 major motion pictures, including John Huston’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” Robert Wise’ “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” Tony Richardson’s “The Loved One,” Josh Logan’s “Paint Your Wagon’” Mike Nichols’ “Working Girl,” and Ron Maxwell’s “Gods and Generals,” in which he also coached 42 other actors and actresses (including Robert Duvall, Jeff Daniels, and Mira Sorvino) to do various specific Civil War era Southern and Northern dialects. For many years he played a wide range of dialect characters on all the top comedy shows, beginning in 1950 with Jack Benny, The Colgate Comedy Hour and Red Skelton (with whom he worked for almost 20 years). He also worked with Milton Berle, Bob Hope, George Gobel, Danny Kaye, Alan Young, Lucille Ball, and Burns and Allan on their shows. In addition, he has acted on radio programs for NBC, CBS, ABC, Armed Forces Radio Service, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the BBC. In 2005, Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters awarded Bob their prestigious “Diamond Circle Award” for “Many Distinguished Years in Radio and Television.” Easton attended dialect classes at University College in London, followed by an advanced dialect master class at Clare College, Cambridge (taught by Stanley Ellis, chief researcher for the 13 volume Survey of English Dialects). Easton also spent two summers studying at Trinity College in Dublin, making weekend research trips to every part of Ireland. He is credited as a contributor in all three volumes of Accents of English by John C. Wells (1982). Easton has also contributed articles to a number of learned dialect journals. One of the articles he authored is now required reading at 30 Universities and has been quoted into the Congressional record. Robert Easton taught dialects for a number of years at the University of Southern California, and at numerous professional schools, including The Actors and Directors Lab, where his fellow faculty members included William Inge, Harold Clurman, Jack Garfeine, and Marcel Marceau. He has also lectured on dialects at many other Universities and at the Smithsonian. Robert Easton is a popular recurring guest dialect raconteur on dozens of talk shows from around the world, including 7 appearances on the “Tonight Show” with hosts Johnny Carson and Jay Leno. Among the hundreds of British actors and actresses he has coached for memorable dialect roles are Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sir Ian Holm, Sir Michael Gambon, Sir Ben Kingsley, Lady Olivier (Joan Plowright), Minnie Driver, Natasha Richardson, Julie Christie, Hugh Grant, Bob Hoskins, Michael Crawford, Emma Thompson, Jane Seymour, Olivia DeHavilland, and John Cleese. His stellar American clients include Gregory Peck, Tom Hanks, Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lili Tomlin, Charlton Heston, Jane Fonda, Will Smith, Sylvester Stallone, Nicholas Cage, Barbara Hershey, John Travolta, Bette Midler, Forest Whitaker, Ann Margret, Sissy Spacek, Jack Lemmon, James Coburn, Lucy Liu, Hillary Duff, Robert DeNiro, Jason Alexander, Patti Lupone, Hank Azaria, Drew Barrymore, Cloris Leachman, Cameron Diaz, Carol Burnett, George Carlin, Ed Azner, Cher, Stockard Channing, Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, etc. A few of his clients from other countries include Mel Gibson, Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Richard Harris, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Maximilian Schell, Lena Olin, Rutger Hauer, Brian Brown, Charlize Theron, Sam Neal, Lucy Lawless, Sinead O’Connor, Joan Chen, Andy Garcia, etc. Easton coached many of these clients into roles for which they received nominations and awards-Oscars, Emmy’s, Golden Globes, Cannes Film Festival, and Screen Actor’s Guild awards. The year that he coached Helen Hunt and Robin Williams for their Oscar winning roles in “As Good as It Gets” and “Good Will Hunting,” respectively, Bob took understandable vicarious pride. (Two out of the four Oscars, or in baseball parlance, he was batting 500).

Eliza Jane Schneider, actress, songstress, oral historian, dialect researcher, and playwright, has been fascinated by sound all her life. At age 7, she was recognized as a violin virtuoso, studying the Suzuki ear-training method at the Eastman School of Music, where she also studied classical voice. She now sings, plays, and writes music for television and radio recording artists, and plays 11 instruments. She was raised on a Chippewa reservation by a German drama teacher/playwright and a Jewish legal aid attorney. By age twelve, she had gotten her Equity card playing an English role in “A Christmas Carol” and an American Southern role in “Inherit the Wind.” She has traversed America ten times recording dialects, and distilled the enormous amount of information she accumulated into her critically acclaimed one-woman show, “FREEDOM OF SPEECH,” in which she recreates 34 different dialect characters from all around the country. “FREEDOM OF SPEECH” premiered in the summer of 2003 at the New York International Fringe Festival to rave reviews and won the “Best Solo Show” award. It then ran Off-Broadway at P.S. 122 in the Spring of 2004, ending up at The Public Theater in the fall of 2005. The Washington Center for the Performing Arts and CitiStage/Symphony Hall in Springfield Massachusetts booked the popular show for their 2004-2005 seasons. Eliza Jane Schneider was profiled on the International BRAVO! Network’s “Arts & Minds” program, along with “Sting.” For five years, she voiced eight different female characters for Comedy Central’s hit animated series “South Park.” She’s created multiple dialect characters for MTV’s series, “3 South”, NBC’s “King of the Hill,” the Mel Gibson film, “What Women Want,” and PIXAR’s smash feature, “Finding Nemo.” On camera, Eliza Jane recurred on UPN’s “Girlfriends” as a white girl, surprisingly fluent in “Ebonics”. She also recurred as a Russian on NBC’s “Spy TV,” and is known in over 60 countries as series regular “Liza,” on CBS’ “Beakman’s World.” Schneider is a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) sponsored playwright who has developed her plays, including “Sounds of Silence: A Documentary Puppet Musical Farce about the 2004 Election in Ohio,” with dramaturges at the prestigious O’Neill Theater Center in New London, Connecticut, for the past two years. In 1998 her solo play, “USA 911” was critically acclaimed all the way from Madison Wisconsin to Kilkenny, Ireland, and won her inclusion in the California Arts Council’s Touring Artist’s Roster. Her first solo play, “Road Trip” won her a Drama-Logue Critic’s Award for Outstanding Performance. A 20-year veteran of the stage, Schneider has performed in dozens of other plays, including the title roles in Antigone and Agnes of God (another award winning performance). In 2000, “Blue Girl,” her science fiction rock opera about the return of the goddess, won the LA Weekly’s “Best of LA” award, and in that same year, she also starred in “Blue Girl” at the Mogodor Opera House in Paris, France as part of the 2000 Millennial New Year’s celebration, with former cast members from the Cirque Du Soleil. Founder of the “Eliza Doolittle Dialects” school, Ms. Schneider is often called upon to coach actors for dialect roles and to help foreigners speak English with an American accent. She has organized numerous master-classes with Robert Easton for some of the other top voice artists in Hollywood. Eliza Jane studied dialects and acting at Northwestern University and UCLA, where she graduated with a BFA from the World Arts and Cultures Department in Theater. She wrote her senior thesis on American Regional Dialects, and then participated in the Dialect 2000 conference at Queens University Belfast dealing with Scottish, Ulster, and Hiberno-English. Some of her recordings were used in the creation of the book resulting from that conference, Language Links: The Languages of Scotland and Ireland (edited by John M Kirk and Donall P O Baoill, 2001.) In 2002, she recorded hundreds of Alaskan dialects, canvassing reservations, bars, and street-corners from Juneau to Barrow. In 2003, she attended the joint meeting of the Northern English Dialect Societies in Yorkshire and recorded additional dialects from Cumbria to East Anglia. In November of 2005, she added the dialects of South Africa to her DAT collection, and she plans to collect various dialects of the West Indies in March of 2006, while on a live tour of the songs from her new solo music album, “Gypsy Grass.” Eliza Jane Schneider will continue to traverse the globe. So far, she has digitally recorded over 1200 interviews with native speakers of variant forms of English throughout the world.