To sound like a Brit, you’ll need a “flexible tongue tip,” and for that you must exercise, says Barbara Berkery, a dialect and voice coach currently tutoring Geoffrey Rush on the Queensland set of the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” film.
Americans have particularly lazy tongue tips. When Berkery is training an actor in a British accent, she starts with a tongue boot camp of silent flicks and twists. There is a physicality to speech we prattling adults often overlook.