Meet Nikolina Page | Linguist, Dialect Coach, Actress & Comedian

We had the good fortune of connecting with Nikolina Page and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Nikolina, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
You know how UK/Australian actors have flawless American accents on the screen? That didn’t happen overnight. They’ve had years of conservatory or private coaching to get to that level. With my $1.99/month Online Dialect Course, I want to take the privilege out of accent acquisition and help anyone build these specialized skills for any accent.

Having lived in several lower-income countries, I wanted to use my Master’s in Linguistics, corporate background in eLearning, and practical experience as a multilingual/multidialectal actor and dialect coach to create a self-paced curriculum to empower anyone who desires to learn and practice these skills.

My vision is to teach anyone, anywhere in the world, how to acquire any accent on their own, thereby deconstructing linguistic bias, and make it globally affordable at just $1.99/month.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?

Even though I had been stage performing seriously since I was 10 years old, when I got into Brown University for college, my family wanted me to pick a “real career.” I ended up studying French, Russian, and the politics of post-Soviet states, but, after the 2008 recession, I pivoted in graduate school to linguistics and software development. I always considered myself a language nerd, whether human or computer, but nothing, not even yoga, could fill the hole in my heart for the arts.

When I started my life over to be a performance artist and screen actor, after spending 6 months at a yoga, arts, and shamanism school in Ecuador in 2019, I wondered what had been the purpose of my previous education. And that’s when I found Knight Thompson Speechwork (KTS) and dialect coaching; the fusion of applied linguistics through performance, wrapped in an identity-affirming ethical philosophy.

Historically, dialect training, or accent reduction, has been a conductor of linguistic discrimination. Plus, sound-matching by ear is subject to all kinds of unconscious bias, problematic descriptive labels, and personal defeat when you fail to match a sound consistently.

As a previous intern of KTS, I love their physical approach to developing oral postures to take care of the bulk of accurate phonetic production, which focuses on anatomy and learning how to re-coordinate your face and vocal tract to create your dialectal instrument of choice. However, even with a master’s in linguistics, I found their linguistic component too academic to be practical. It’s great for a research setting, but not for those with busy lives trying to get a job. Plus, the coaching component relied heavily on private coaching, which financially is not an option for many and keeps dialect development in the realm of a privilege.

As a working multidialectal international actress with a corporate instructional design background, I realized I could bring together the best of all of my worlds: scaffolding levels of physical coordination drills while introducing model speakers of a target dialect immediately and introducing linguistics concepts only as they directly relate to the context of current exercises, building complexity one layer at a time in a self-paced online environment.

The beauty of this approach is that once you have the coordination, analysis, and modeling skills, you can apply it to any accent, dialect, or even your own speaking voice! And the thrill of deconstructing unconscious speaking habits and experiencing them element by element reconnects you with your personal mind-body human experience in quite a yogic way.

For me, this online dialect course combines my desire to make the world a better place with my passion for language and global communication by empowering others to confidently express themselves in whatever articulatory pattern they would like, whether professionally or in life.

The biggest challenge in my business is that I am committed to keeping this constantly-evolving curriculum internationally-affordable at $1.99/month, which I’m operating from an economies of scale business model, so I need a lot of customers to succeed! But it is my mission to get this powerful information into as many minds and mouths as possible all over the world. In many ways, it’s a humorous program because you can’t instruct people how to develop awareness inside their own mouths without being open, vulnerable, and a little silly.

In addition to adding materials and serving my current student-base, who love it, I’m currently on an education and marketing mission. Nothing like this has ever existed in this way, so generally people don’t know how to process when I say I have a $1.99/month online dialect course. But when I moved to LA in 2021, just another actress at the bottom of the ladder, it was my language and dialect skills that got me the great international representation team I have today. And it’s a useful skill set for anyone who uses their voice for living, whether it’s making phone calls, presenting in meetings, or building relationships.

I dare anyone to give it a try and I bet you’ll have fun. And at under $2/month that can be cancelled at any time – what do you have to lose? I hope it’s a no-brainer, because no matter what it will give your brain a boost!

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.

As an entertainer who has fallen in love with modern European clowning, not circus clowning, I’d recommend seeing Stamptown at the Bourbon Room in Hollywood. It’s an uproarious fever dream the likes of which your endorphins have likely never experienced.

And to that end, I’d also recommend taking a workshop with Jet Eveleth at Clown Church LA to tap into the presence and raw emotion of your inner four-year-old. It’s a transformative experience in vulnerability I’ve only otherwise experienced in tantric/shamanic classes in Ecuador.

Then, drive through the winding Hollywood hills via Mulholland until you get to the ocean and take a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway, seeing some avant-garde theater at the Italian-themed Getty villa and soaking in the beaches of Malibu!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’d like to shout out to my first dialect coach, Chris T. Lang, in Colorado. Chris recognized that, with my background in academic linguistics and the entertainment industry, I’d be a good fit for becoming a dialect coach myself. He helped me experience the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) practically for the first time, taught me how to break down my first dialects on my own (West Texas and Russian), plus introduced me to the Knight Thompson Speechwork organization, with whom I eventually became an intern before setting off for Los Angeles after acting in Mexico, post-pandemic. 

Website: https://nikolina.page

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikolina.page

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolinapage/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nikolinapage

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hello.nikolinapage/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nikolinapage

Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5788563/ https://www.tiktok.com/@nikolina.page https://www.pinterest.com/nikolinapage

Image Credits
Isabella Vosmikova, Megan Beck, Isak Hanold, Caleb Jon