Hi, I’m Kim and I’m a teacher who specializes in helping adult multilingual learners improve their English. I’m based in Los Angeles, California, in the United States, but I help English learners online, all over the world.
Welcome to English in America!
In today’s episode, I’m going to talk to you briefly about accents. One of the most common things to hear from English learners is the desire to want to lose their accent, or reduce their accent, or a lot of times I’ll have a student say, “I want to sound like a native English speaker.” And when I hear this, my initial reaction and feeling is always a little bit of sadness, honestly. And here's why: there's absolutely nothing wrong with having an accent! Because we all have an accent. Everyone has an accent. Every English speaker in the world has an accent. Every speaker of your first language has an accent. You have an accent in your own first language. You will inevitably have an accent in English. And that's okay! There's nothing wrong with that. No two English speakers in the United States or in the world, actually, sound exactly the same and there is no reason that they should.
Your goal as you learn English shouldn't be to lose your accent, it should be to make yourself easily understood by other users of English. And that means other users of English who have an accent completely different than yours.
There is a researcher by the name of Robert Delaney, who, a few years ago, I believe he was from Long Island University in New York, came up with a dialect map of all the dialects based on regions in the United States. He found that there are 24 regional dialects in the United States. What that means is that there are 24 parts of the United States where people from those distinct areas sound very different and use the English language very differently from each other. I don't think this is an incredibly unusual concept or new information. I mean, most of us have watched TV shows or movies or even heard songs where we hear people use different accents.
For instance, in a TV show, if someone is from New York, they have a specific accent. A New York-sounding accent. That doesn't sound the same as someone from Mississippi, that's a different accent, different region, different dialect. Even though they're using English, they use it differently because they have a different dialect. Which also creates a different accent.
So even within the United States there are so, so many different accents. And that's just referring to people who grew up only speaking English. For those people in the United States who grew up speaking a different language at home other than English or more than one language at home, in addition to English or without English.
My point being, we all have unique experiences with English and the way that we engage with English is unique to each of us. And you bring that to English, when you learn it. And it's important that you bring that to English when you learn it, your background, and your accent and your understanding, and the way you engage with the language, because that's what makes it unique to you.
So I really want to drive home, sort of, the goal for you of not focusing on losing your accent or reducing your accent or sounding like a native English speaker. Because that's not the goal.
The best possible goal you can have as you learn English is to add to your own accent. You're adding an English accent to your collection of accents. You have your first language accent and you're going to have your English accent. And we love that, that's fantastic!
Your only goal as you learn English is to try to make yourself understood by other English users. That's it. It's not to speak without an accent. It's not to sound like you don't have an accent. It's not to sound like a native English speaker, it's simply to get your message across successfully. And if you do that, you are a successful and fluent English user.
I'm going to include a link to the dialect map that I talked about a moment ago from Robert Delaney in the notes for this episode. So, if you'd like to see that, be sure and click on that link.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode about accent addition.
If you have any questions or if you have any ideas or comments that you'd like me to know about, please email me: Kim@EnglishTeacherAndTutor.com.
For more information about my tutoring and teaching, please feel free to check out my website: EnglishTeacherAndTutor.com.
Thanks for listening!