Clients who come to me for speech and pronunciation training usually have two goals: get rid of their accents and speak clearly. There seems to be an underlying assumption that accent and clarity are always linked. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are plenty of native-English speakers that are hard to understand in international settings, and there are just as many, if not more, non-native speakers who speak clearly and are easy to understand regardless of their accents.
Can you ever ‘get rid of’ an accent?
There are a few problems with the goal of getting rid of an accent. First of all, if we get rid of your accent, which accent are we putting in its place? There is no ‘neutral’ accent. If you speak General American (the ‘neutral’ American accent), then you are still viewed as having an accent by everyone that doesn’t speak that way. If you speak RP (the highest standard of British pronunciation), even more people in the world will notice your accent, because it’s estimated that there are less than 1.5 million RP speakers in the world (Crystal 2003).
You can’t get rid of an accent. You can modify it, adapt it, and try to sound like someone else, or you can embrace your natural accent and focus on speaking clearly instead.
Speak clearly for an international audience
This is my philosophy and the way that I approach speech and pronunciation training. English is, and has been for quite some time, an international language. No one ‘owns’ it. In fact, native speaker to native speaker communication accounts for only about 4% of English conversations globally. The other 96% include at least one non-native speaker of English (Nerriere & Hon 2009).
It’s no longer important to meet a native standard. In fact, many linguists and EFL teachers believe that it’s impossible to teach or learn native-English-level pronunciation (Jenkins 2000 and Walker 2010, for example).
Did I just put myself out of business?
So what am I saying here? Did I just put myself out of business? I don’t think so. There is still a great need for clarity in our speech. We (native and non-native speakers alike) need to learn how to speak clearly and correctly so we can minimize misunderstandings in our workplaces and successfully communicate with individuals from other backgrounds. We need to understand how other people hear and understand English and what we need to do and change in our speech to be better understood.
Creating a new focus
What should we be focusing on when it comes to speaking English clearly? It really depends on your audience. If you primarily speak with non-native speakers, there are three main areas of your pronunciation that you must master: consonant sounds (minus a couple exceptions that don’t matter), the difference between long and short vowels, and stressing the appropriate words in your sentences. I’ll be discussing all of these areas in more detail on this blog and throughout the full-length English Pronunciation Course.
If your audience is primarily native speakers, you’ll also want to focus on how you stress individual words, because this is important for a native speaker’s level of understanding.
Regardless of your audience, we all need to become more familiar with the thousands of different English accents and varieties of the language that are being used throughout the world. We all need to take responsibility for communicating clearly and making an effort to understand others.
Bottom line: don’t worry about your accent. Focus on speaking clearly, correctly and confidently instead.
If you’d like to learn more about clear speech and pronunciation, please visit me at http://bit.ly/free8-partproncourse and sign up for my free, 8-part pronunciation short course.
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Focusing more on speaking clearly is more important than trying to ‘get rid of’ an accent. I also encourage my clients to speak slowly during sales presentations. Which celebrities have successfully modified their accents to become more easily understood by different audiences?
Speed plays a role, but even more so is the way we “chunk” our messages. If we group our words together in a way that is different than our listener would it ends up sounding fast, when usually it’s just not logical to the listener. This is why proper sentence stress is important – it helps with the “chunking”.
Regarding celebs, how about one who I’m sure is close to your heart: Wozniacki! Although she’s pretty young and is one of the few who could pick up the accent almost perfectly.
The big debate in the US lately has been whether Americans will be able to understand Cheryl Cole as a judge on US XFactor. Not sure if a final decision has been made, but there’s an interesting debate going about whether she should change her accent: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12619718 Guess where I stand on that one!
Spot on Heather! While I was living in Australia, I had some great friends who were of European descent, including Germans, Austrians, French, Danish, Czech, Italian. Also South Africans. Then also I had friends from Myanmar, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and Malaysia. They all spoke good English, clear, to the point and but sometimes with the wrong grammar use. What made them so special were their accents! It was just soooo them!
Now, while some Singaporeans speak exceptionally well, the accent is definitely Singaporean and also spiced with the ‘loh’ and ‘lah’. Some might speak using wrong grammar, but we can still understand them as long as we have spent enough time locally. The slight problem comes when some local people say ‘chop’ your passport at the Immigration Checkpoints. Ha! Ha! As you so rightly pointed out – it should be ‘stamp’ your passport!
Haha, Ricky! Did I ever tell you the story about the guy at Immigration who played a ‘chop’ joke on me? I think I told that story when I was on the radio a couple years ago
Regarding grammar, it’s interesting because along with the linguistic research being done regarding international English pronunciation, there is even more about the general grammar patterns that are forming. Many of the patterns are alive and well here in Singapore: dropping the ‘s’ in 3rd person singular, not using all the tenses, etc. It could very well be the English of the future.
Linguists don’t like to think of any accent as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – they’re all different, but equally valid. It’s perfectly normal for people to identify their favorite accents by the one that set their teeth on edge. I don’t believe accents should be a verified strata for judging people.Language changes over time. We get new words, even with grammatical changes, and accents change over time.
I absolutely agree, Shashi! Every accent is valid. That’s why I have a problem with forcing people into an ‘accent box’ by modelling US or UK English (for example). Interesting info at your link as well, although I’m still not sure what a ‘neutral’ accent refers to. Hope you’ll connect over twitter so we can continue the conversation! (@heatherhansen)