What “neutral” means in a foreign-language voice-over context

The word “neutral” gets used quite a bit in the voice-over world, especially in the context of foreign-language accents. But what does it mean exactly? Is it a concept that can be applied to all languages in similar ways? Are there any standards for it? And, more importantly, how do you make sure you get it for foreign-language recordings?

This blog post will look at what the word “neutral” means in the context of foreign-language voice recording.

[Average read time: 5 minutes]

What are neutral VO accents exactly?

There’s no widely-accepted definition of what a neutral accent is, but there are a few conventions out there. Many people say that it’s an accent that can’t be easily defined as belonging to a particular region. Likewise, it’s often thought of as a formal accent, or even an educated register, which can sometimes be codified. For example, look at the Wikipedia entry on Regional accents of English, specifically it’s explanation of what neutral US English is:

…a form of speech known to linguists as General American is perceived by many Americans to be “accent-less”, meaning a person who speaks in such a manner does not appear to be from anywhere. The region of the United States that most resembles this is the central Midwest, specifically eastern Nebraska (including Omaha and Lincoln), southern and central Iowa (including Des Moines), parts of Missouri, Ohio and western Illinois (including Peoria and the Quad Cities, but not the Chicago area).

Attempts at defining neutral versions of other languages follow a similar tack – making it a specific accent that can’t be tied to a specific origin, but at the same time claiming that a particular region’s accent is most neutral.  For example, in the Spanish voiceover services industry it’s often said that natives of Bogotá speak with a neutral Latin American accent – but this will be quickly contested by someone from Mexico City, Lima, Quito, San José, or a host of other cities in Latin America.

So then what is a neutral accent, exactly? It can be many things, depending on language, overall number of speakers, and various historical factors. The following list will help you make sense of what a neutral accent is, and more specifically, what it can be.

1. It can be an agreed-upon convention.

As stated above, neutral Latin American Spanish is not really an accent of any particular place, but rather an agreed-upon broadcast and dubbing convention. Talents doing the accent just adhere to several basic pronunciation rules – for example, to not aspirate the letter “s,” and to not soften the letter “r” too much, both of which are common in some parts of Latin America. The rest of the rules aren’t very drastic, either, so that just about any Latin American Spanish speaker can adhere to them (which is probably why several regions claim to have “neutral” accents). However, speaking neutrally requires training and concentration, meaning that not everyone makes a good neutral Latin American Spanish voice talent. But the accent does standardize pronunciation for intelligibility, so that it is now commonly heard throughout the continent, and in fact it’s the generally-accepted way of speaking for corporate and e-Learning content. But, again, it’s not an accent that anyone uses naturally.

For more on this voiceover convention, check out our previous post 5 Neutral Latin American Spanish Voice Over Myths Debunked.

2. It can be an academic or historical language spoken by a subset of people.

Many people think of Modern Standard Arabic (also known as MSA) as a neutral version of Arabic which can be used throughout the Middle East. It’s easy to understand the temptation – there are several regional variants of Arabic, and they’re not mutually intelligible, so that MSA is as close as it gets to a lingua franca for the region. However, it’s not a colloquial language, but rather a modernized version of Classical Arabic, the language used in the Koran in the 8^th century, and is specifically taught in schools and as part of a higher education, meaning that it has a limited number of speakers. Therefore, MSA isn’t really a neutral accent of Arabic, but rather a specific variant of it that became the province of educated Arabic-speakers, and is now commonly used for Arabic voiceover for corporate communications and e-Learning courses. For this reason, it’s best to not think of MSA as a neutral accent, but rather a pan-Arabic language spoken by a subset of the population.

For more information on recording this language, check out our previous post What you need to know before you record Arabic voice over.

3. It can be a regional accent that became a neutral language.

Sometimes, however, historical languages can turn into the lingua franca of a country. For example, during the Napoleonic Wars, Parisian French became France’s national language, subsuming the various regional accents and dialects spoken at the time. There are still some differences in accent between the northern and southern parts of the country, but the Parisian accent is commonly understood to be the preferred neutral accent used in French voice over for broadcast and corporate communications.

A similar thing happened with what we now know as Italian – it started out as the Tuscan language, spoken in Florence and the surrounding areas, but it became a kind of lingua franca to the upper or educated classes during the Renaissance, and then it became the national language of Italy in 1861. Because of the demographic movements of World War I and the spread of public education, this Italian came to be spoken by the population at large and is now the accepted standard accent – this is what you’d record if you had a corporate Italian voice over project.

Despite their prevalence, it’s good to remember that it’s not so much that these accents are neutral per sé, but rather that they’re accepted as a kind of convention or standard for communications.

So what do you need to know for voiceover?

To start, just be aware that neutral accents are a convention, and one that’s different from language to language, whether it’s an agreed-upon set of pronunciation restrictions, an academic or historical language, or even a regional variant that has spread widely. And that’s if it exists as a concept for that language in the first place – remember that for many languages there isn’t a neutral standard. The idea of a “neutral” variant can be useful for voiceover services, though, when you think about its goal – to communicate effectively, providing a consistent experience that also feels local to a large group of people.

The other thing you should do is be aware of your audience in each language, and what it expects. A corporate audience in the Middle East may be fine with MSA, but if your audience is specifically in Egypt, it may be better to record in Egyptian Arabic. For this reason, it’s good to run voice samples and language specs by an in-country team, and to try to narrow down the audience scope as closely as possible, to know how much can be covered with a neutral accent, or even whether or not your multimedia project will benefit from it. Make sure to allow time during the casting and pre-production to find the right talent, with the right accent, for each regional audience – it will mean more work and longer timelines upfront, but it will pay off handsomely during production and release.