I'm a voice expert, here's how to use your Scottish accent to succeed like Billy Connolly and Ewan McGregor

Scottish Sun

03-05-2025

A few tweaks in our delivery will allow us to be better understood
IT'S MURRRDUR I'm a voice expert, here's how to use your Scottish accent to succeed like Billy Connolly and Ewan McGregor
FOOTIE idol Gary Caldwell claimed an English ref recently red-carded him because of his accent, while Edinburgh Uni staff have taken training courses to tackle 'accent bias' against homegrown students.
While a Scottish brogue can be a plus for actors like Ewan McGregor and the late Sir Sean Connery, it can also have a negative effect.
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Ewan McGregor's accent has been the key to his success
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Mark McManus's Taggart rolled his Rs
However, a leading UK voice coach believes Scots don't have to dull down their dulcet tones to get ahead.
Chief Features Writer MATT BENDORIS speaks to communications coach Anthony Shuster about the pros and cons of a having strong Scottish voice.
TAGGART'S famous catchphrase was 'There's been a murrrdur' but voice expert Anthony Shuster believes the way Scots roll their 'Rs' means 'murder' can sound like an entirely different word to English ears.
That's just one example of different pronunciations that can make those from north of the border more difficult to understand.
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However, Anthony insists that Scots are not murdering the English language by the way we speak.
Instead he maintains that just a few tweaks in our delivery will allow us to be better understood not just by our English cousins, but far further afield.
He said: 'Murder is the perfect example. You don't get that long, drawn-out vowel in most English accents.
'So the way Scots pronounce their Rs means that murder almost sounds like an entirely different word.
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'I think it's often this disparity between the sound that the listener is familiar with and the sound that they're hearing that makes them sort of instinctively flinch a little bit and go, 'what is this person saying?'.'
RADA-trained actor Anthony, who has had TV roles in Casualty, Holby City and the Boris Johnson Covid drama This England, has become one of the UK's leading accent specialists over the last decade.
Michael Parkinson's famous interview with Billy Connolly is a remarkable piece of telly – it gets better every year
And while many of his clients don't have English as their first language, he says a lot of big businesses also send Scottish executives to him for training.
He explains: 'I had one guy recently from the central belt who had a strong Scottish accent and said to me, 'I work with a lot of international clients and they just can't follow my accent'.
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'The first thing I explain is that you don't have to reduce your accent if you're Scottish. So I certainly do not encourage putting on some sort of posh English accent when you're at work because as soon as you start doing that you will feel like a fake.
'But what I do encourage them to think about is pacing and tone and to think about the experience of the listener.
'A lot of people, especially from the central belt, speak incredibly quickly. They don't have to work too hard to be understood by people from their neck of the woods.
'For those who are not so familiar with that accent then you have to work that little bit harder, but not necessarily by sounding any less Scottish.
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'You do need to respect the fact that you are going to need to slow that pace down a little bit and certainly pause more frequently.'
Former Celtic and Scotland star Caldwell claimed he was sent to the stand from the dug-out as Exeter City boss during a League One encounter with Lincoln City in March because of his strong accent.
And Anthony, 46, believes that 'accent bias' does exist.
He said: 'I think accent had a part to play in this football manager getting pulled up. We can't deny that accent bias exists, because it can.
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'It's like you can already hear the cogs turning and people will start to pigeonhole you because of your accent.
'Then they'll make all their assumptions about what Russian people are like, or French people or Scottish people and they're going to start seeing you through that filter.'
He adds: 'But rather than get hung up on whether people are being prejudiced, I think a lot of the time it is to do with the way brains work. It's like a cognitive thing.
'If you're hearing a sound that you're not very familiar with and you're having to work quite hard just to literally understand what somebody's saying, then you're actually less likely to trust them.
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'So you have less credibility, even though what you're saying might be totally sound. But if people find it harder to understand, they're less likely to buy into it.'
But coming from an acting background, Warwickshire-born Anthony has also seen how a strong Scottish accent has worked for some of Scotland's showbiz greats.
He says: 'Billy Connolly is probably the most famous Scottish person there is and his accent didn't noticeably, not to my ear anyway, get any milder when he moved to America.
'In fact his accent was his calling card. But while that works for a larger-than-life character like Billy, who lives life on the front foot, it won't work for different, perhaps quieter personalities.
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'That's when you get people shutting down a bit because the colleagues they are dealing with at work are unable to understand them.'
However, Anthony does believe Billy's fellow Scots can take a leaf out of the Big Yin's book regarding communication skills for everyday life.
He says: 'There are many things you can work on that are nothing to do with pronunciation.
'One major thing you can change is how much energy you use when you're speaking.
'Some people have got a monotone voice that fails to hold attention, especially if it's delivered in an unfamiliar accent.
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'But if you speak with more oomph — not necessarily pace — like Billy does then that will certainly help catch the listener's attention and makes them concentrate on what you are saying.'