Before becoming a dialect coach, I taught linguistics at Hunter College in New York City, where I specialized in teaching about the many dialects of the English language. I have taught classes on both The Structure of Modern English and The History of the English Language. I am also a linguistics researcher and have studied the general nature of language, have written about many European languages and the Shupamem language of Cameroon, and have some degree of speaking ability in German, French, Spanish, Welsh, and some non-standard varieties of English.
Before my time in academia, I grew up in New York City with parents and relatives involved in the performing arts. In college, I took a class on phonetics, the study of speech sounds. After finishing that class, I tried learning a new accent from a guide made to help dialect coaches teach actors accents. I found that, with just the knowledge from my phonetics class and practice, I was able to pick up a new accent at a basic level.
I have taught myself many other accents since then and have greatly improved my learning speed and accuracy over time. I now have a PhD in linguistics, but I knew even in college that, if I could use phonetics to learn accents well, other people could benefit from phonetics training too, so, now that I am a fully certified expert in language, I share my specialized skills and knowledge with actors who want to learn accents. For efficiency and relevance, my individual accent training is restricted to what actors need to learn the specific accents they want and my 12-session signature course on deep understanding includes only the parts of the academic phonetics curriculum that are useful to actors.
It is my hope that, by teaching accents and general phonetics in this way, I am advancing the careers of talented actors and fueling the beauty the performance world creates.
- Benjamin Cannicott Shavitz, PhD (Linguistics),
Dialect Coach,
Creator and Instructor of Phonetics for Actors,
Linguist and Former Linguistics Professor at Hunter College in New York City,
VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association) member
