Accent reduction has many names
Accent reduction is the most common term used to describe training which changes someone’s accent to be more similar to that of the local community, but you will find a range of other terms. They all refer to the same area of training, but some people dislike the word “reduction” as they feel it implies that an accent is bad.
Accent reduction is best thought of as being the “reduction of difference” between your accent and the listener’s accent.
The more careful term is “accent modification” (which we use most of the time across this website), and sometimes you’ll see reference to “neutralising” an accent or getting accent “therapy” (as if it’s an illness; it isn’t!). At a practical level, it doesn’t matter. Use what you’re comfortable with.
How does accent training work?
Most trainers rely on mimicry/imitation: the student/client is just given spoken examples to copy in the hope that they learn to make the correct sound.
Some trainers will spend a lot of time explaining all the parts of the mouth and the tongue, and teaching the pronunciation symbols used in dictionaries. For an ambitious learner with a lot of time, this can be useful, but for most people it delays actual practical learning. That’s a bit like teaching someone how to cook without letting them step into a kitchen!
Changing your accent requires intense training in how to hear differences and pronounce accurately. It isn’t enough to have theoretical knowledge.
What’s the difference between pronunciation mistakes and accent problems?
Most of the time it is not very helpful to differentiate between the two because they mean a range of things to different people.
Technically, however, a pronunciation mistake is when you don’t know that a word should contain a certain sound, whereas an accent problem is when you have do know the correct pronunciation (in theory) but it comes out in a way which is incorrect or different from the local pronunciation.
For instance, if you look at a navy blue car and:
- call it purple, that’s like a pronunciation error (incorrect knowledge);
- call it sky blue, then that’s like an accent problem (wrong sort of blue).
For a real language example, if you mispronounced the word cake as kek there could be two reasons:
- you wrongly think it has the sound /e/ in it (like in bet) -> that’s a pronunciation error (incorrect knowledge)
- you correctly know it should be /keɪk/ but every time you try to say the word it stilll sounds like kek -> that’s an accent problem.
What is needed in order to provide effective accent training?
- Detailed understanding of the sound systems (“phonology”) of different languages
- Detailed understanding of the exact pronunciation (“phonetics”) of the sounds in the relevant dialect of English
- Detailed understanding of how people (mis-)hear sounds based on previous experience (language bias), and how to explain/teach the differences between sounds (“language acquisition”; “comparative phonetics”)
- Knowledge of historical and current pronunciation trends, so that clients are given correct guidance, rather than textbook out-of-date rules
- The ability to adapt teaching techniques to individual learning patterns and challenges
Why is most accent training only weakly effective?
Most trainers do not have the knowledge required (see below). They instead use the basic formal descriptions in textbooks as their guide. They might have had a few weeks of training in or a month of in a speech pathology course. They then choose the “typical” problem sounds for a learner of English from a certain background and focus on those sounds. The problem is that people from the same background do not all have the same problems, and even when they do, the solution is not always the same.
Fundamentally, most trainers still rely on the student to just do their “best imitation” of what the teacher says and that’s it. If you don’t teach a student how to hear detail, and be able to tell whether their pronunciation is right or wrong, the student’s performance will hardly improve, but the student might feel (incorrectly) more confident/satisfied because they feel that they “understand” how English works. It’s a bit of a marketing trick. Customers will often feel empowered by knowledge, even if they can’t use that knowledge to make significant change.
Speech therapists aren’t trained to do accent reduction
The majority of providers are speech therapists, yet they are not trained to provide accent modification, despite what they often claim.
Most have only had less than two months of training in English phonetics and phonology in a multi-year degree! They will not have been taught about other languages, nor how to correct accent problems. They certainly have nothing approaching “expertise” in this area. (People often turn to speech therapists for help because they aren’t sure who can actually help, so the speech therapists branch out into accent modification work because they want to expand their income sources.)
A degree in speech pathology involves basic training over one to three years to correct defects resulting from developmental, neurological, or psychological problems, and they can do very good work with patients like that.
However, an accent is not a defect to be corrected, does not have the characteristics of developmental or neurological speech problems, and does not need “diagnosis” and “treatment”! The only speech therapists I have ever met with even moderate knowledge of phonetic and phonological systems in languages, the acoustics of speech, language structures, cultural behaviours and the subtleties of accents and pronunciation have been a few university-level researchers.
Who is actually trained to provide accent reduction?
Honestly, no-one. Every single YouTuber, online trainer, entrepreneurial English teacher or drama coach or singer is either reproducing what the textbooks say or trying hard to value-add from their own creativity.
Even the very few experienced phoneticians who offer accent training (like us, and a few people in other countries) have no explicit practical training in helping people fix accent problems, but do have massive knowledge of how humans communicate, learn languages and accents, and the technical expertise and teaching experience to find a way to develop training.
We (Dr Debbie Loakes and Dr Duncan Markham) are academic linguists by training. We have PhDs covering phonetics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and linguistics, and have taught at universities and in the “real world” for more than two decades.
What is a linguist?
In everyday speech a linguist is someone who has a special role using language in an organisation (typically military or intelligence), but a true academic linguist is very different: we are trained in Linguistics, which is the science of human communication using language.
We study how language is used in different communities, the origins of language, how communication changes over time, how humans think about meaning and sound and grammar and organise it all, and as linguistic phoneticians we study in extreme detail the sounds used in different languages.
How can I fix pronunciation errors?
You can fix pronunciation errors somewhat easily by learning what the correct sounds in each word are meant to be (this is where the International Phonetic Alphabet and YouTube/dictionaries/etc can be very helpful), so irregular words like salmon and debt and naïve can be easily corrected.
Some apps might help with reducing the number of pronunciation mistakes, as long as it is for the correct dialect! Remember that any of these products will only help with very basic problems.
How can I change my accent by myself?
Social contact. That’s the primary passive pathway for most people to sound more like their local environment. Social contact, not just working next to locals.
In terms of active steps, it is very hard to predict, because if you have an accent that hasn’t changed by itself then you probably need external help to guide you. Most videos/books are of limited help for accent change because they rely on you being able to hear the difference between your accent and what the correct version sounds like. Those resources can, however, help you correct pronunciation mistakes, which is a good start.
What techniques are used to help fix accent problems?
Our “method” is just the use of excellent knowledge, careful analysis and insight, and good teaching (including being careful about observing how the client is learning and responding to new challenges. Most importantly, our focus is on making sure that performance actually changes. It’s not good enough to “know” how a word should be pronounced, but not actually to be able to say it right!
This is not rocket science, but it requires the trainer to have extensive experience and significant expertise. If you come across someone saying they have some sort of Magic Technique™ that revolutionises learning, they’re probably just doing a marketing trick. If you see some sort of app that uses Artificial Intelligence to help you improve your accent, it is unlikely to work for anyone other than a beginner, and you cannot guarantee how accurate or appropriate for the local dialect of English it might be.
Do you need to learn all those strange IPA (pronunciation) symbols in order to change your accent?
No. You’ll find many trainers will waste hours of a client’s paid time to teach the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) — the pronunciation symbols used in many dictionaries. This is because textbooks always focus on this.
Now, while real linguists also love the IPA, we know that it isn’t the only solution in a training environment as many people find it extremely difficult to learn/use such symbols. We work hard to find other solutions for many of our clients. Of course, learning some of the symbols can help read crucial info in a dictionary, so wherever possible we try to find the right balance between using important symbols and the other solutions.