Whitney Nelson - Accent Reduction For Professionals: How to Eliminate Your Accent to Sound More American

How to eliminate your accent to sound more American

Whitney Nelson

Copyright 2015 by Whitney Nelson

All Rights Reserved

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Table of Contents

Introduction

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It may frustrate you endlessly especially as a professional with goals of being successful in your career. The fact that many find your accent charming doesnt compensate much. It certainly doesnt mean itll make you successful.

Of course, your accent is less than charming when it prevents someone from understanding what youre saying. Its less than charming when you find yourself repeating yourself. Its especially frustrating and less than charming when you discover that your accent is actually preventing you from advancing in your chosen career.

While this book is useful to all individuals who wish to reduce their accent and sound more like a native speaker, its written with the professional individual in mind. If your English language skills are solid, your grasp of the vocabulary solid and youre comfortable speaking the language itself, then you may very well be searching for the last piece of the puzzle. Eliminating the accent so you can not only be understood a bit more easily, but feel like youre a better fit into your office environment.

As sad as it may seem, a strong accent when speaking English can actually keep you from achieving your career goals as well as reaching your full potential. It has been proven that when some individuals continually ask you to repeat yourself, it can lower your chances of professional advancement. In other words, enunciating your words and using correct grammar are two requirements to conquer the business world today.

I know how serious you are about your career. Because of this, I also know how serious you are about improving both your pronunciation and in the process reducing and eliminating your accent. This book deals specifically with helping you speak more like a native.

Working with Your Accent

Before you get the wrong idea, theres absolutely nothing wrong with a foreign accent. Everyone even native speakers of English have some type of accent. Have you ever traveled to Boston or New York and listened in on conversations residents of those cities hold on the street?

Arguably, there are also situations when you can use your accent to your advantage. If you want move from being considered at very good at the English language to the next level, excellent, then you need to make a concerted effort to help soften your accent.

Well help you do just that. Once youve conquered your accent, youll notice how confident you are in talking not only to your supervisors, colleagues and clients, but also at making presentations.

What is an Accent?

In the largest sense of the word, an accent is how you sound when you speak. Generally speaking, there are two types of accents. The first is what is most commonly identified as a foreign accent. This accent is the natural lingering effects of learning, lets say English, using (consciously or unconsciously) the rules or sounds of your native language.

Its actually a coping mechanism, if you really think about it. When youre learning English as a second language, you may encounter some difficulty making all of the sounds of English. There are several sounds that no other language contains. Or it could be that your mouth isnt cooperating because it never had to say these sounds before.

The accent occurs when you substitute similar sounds, drawn from your native language. Its called a foreign accent simply because it sounds foreign to those who are native speakers of English.

The second type of accent, which we lightly touched on earlier, is the one which is used by a specific group of native speakers, usually clustered in a general geographical location. These individuals have cultivated certain pronunciations that are unique to them. Consider the classic Boston accent. Or the accent youll find among many in New York City. If you travel the United States at all, youll discover variations of accents. From North Carolina, to Kentucky to Texas, each of these areas contain their own accents.

Why are some Sounds Difficult for Some Individuals?

Some people, youll notice, have a difficult time with sounds that are new to them. The truth is, if you would have learned these sounds when you were an infant, you wouldnt have any trouble at all with them. Children are born with the amazing ability of being able to pronounce all the sounds of every language.

As an infant matures, however, she or he soon learns which specific sounds are important in his language. He then simply ignores the others. If the sounds dont serve the infant and he doesnt use them, you can see how easily it could be for that ability to slip away.

Linguists say that by the time children reach one year of age, theyve intuitively learned which sounds dont serve them and simply disregard them. As we age then, these sounds become increasingly more difficult to pronounce.

Individual sounds arent the only reason you may find yourself speaking with an accent. There are elements to any language called sound patterns. Specific sound patterns naturally differ among languages. To fully understand this youll need to look an example or two.

A syllable in an English word may begin or end with a cluster of consonants, like str and ngth. Right now, think of the word strength. This word contains both of those. This is different than the Japanese language, in which a typical syllable contains no more than one consonant immediately followed by one vowel. The examples here are in ma or ki.

For native Japanese speakers, pronouncing these consonant clusters can be problematic. This is why they may place a vowel sound between the consonants in an English cluster.

Another cause of a foreign accent may be derived from the natural sentence structuring of the language. This problem often crops up in Russian. An excellent example is found in the English sentence The house is very large. The problem for the native speaking Russian is that there is no word corresponding to the English word the. Therefore, he doesnt see it as essential to speaking it in English.

The second problem is that Russian doesnt require the speaker to place the verb is in the sentence. So, if youre translating the sentence into English, the typical Russian speaker would be inclined to simply say, House very large. While it sounds perfect to the Russian ear, it sounds clumsy to the English ear.

Is Eliminating Accent Really Necessary?

Many students of English ask if eliminating their accent is really necessary. For some, it may not be. There are many individuals who take great pride in their accent. My grandmother, whose first language was Slovak never lost her accent. I suspect that she retained it out of a sense of pride. That doesnt mean she didnt have a great grasp of English. She did. She lived to be 87 years old and always talked with an accent. But then, she was essential a farmer and a stay-at-home mom.