Why do people find it difficult to speak with an ‘English’ or ‘RP’ accent?

Every accent is difficult for non-native speakers to truly master, because every accent is a set of deeply-ingrained habits, of your muscles and your brain. To change the way you speak, you have to understand those habits, and then learn to consciously replace them with new ones. But a standard English (or ‘RP, which stands for Received Pronunciation - the ‘received’ wisdom on how English should sound) accent has several unique features that don’t occur in many other languages, so most speakers of other languages find them really difficult to replicate. Here’s some examples.

Consonants: every language has particular sounds that learners find hard to get right. In standard British and American English the obvious ones are the ‘r’ and ‘th’ sounds. Also, the ‘w’ sound is a weird one for lots of people: for German, Russian and Hindi speakers, ‘what do you want?’ will tend to come out as ‘vot do you vont?’

Vowel sounds: some of the vowel sounds in standard English simple don’t have an equivalent sound in other languages.

The ‘u’ sound in ‘butter’ is quite unique to standard English; from Polish, Italian or Spanish speakers ‘butter’ will sound like ‘batter’.

Or the ‘ee’ sound in ‘three’: it doesn’t occur in some languages, like Russian. So a phrase like ‘I don’t want to leave here’ from a Russian speaker might sound like ‘I don’t want to live here’.

Unstressed vowels: a native English speaker from the UK or America would say

‘fish ‘n’ chips’

They don’t stress the ‘a’ in ‘and’ in this instance. But a Nigerian might say

‘fish AND chips’

It changes the rhythm of the phrase from

‘dum-de-dum’ - ‘fish-n-chips’

to

‘dum-dum-dum’ - ‘fish-AND-chips’

 and it’s that unfamiliar rhythm which British or American ears find tricky to tune into.

Spelling: as any English speaker who’s ever failed a spelling test will know,  pronunciation is a very poor guide to English spelling: the same letter can represent multiple different sounds, and the same sound can apply to multiple combinations of letters, an obvious example being –ough, which has a completely different sound in the words bough, cough, dough, enough, through and thorough. Learners of English often get into the habit of saying words the way they’re written, and then really struggle to unlearn those pronunciations when they come to an English-speaking country. I coached an Italian lawyer who couldn’t believe that we didn’t pronounce the ‘r’ at the end of words like ‘labour’ and ‘daughter’ (“is it really just ‘lay-buh’? ‘Daw-tuh’? That’s so much easier!”)  

What do you mean, ‘reduce’ your accent? Reduce it to what?

Everyone has an accent. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘correct’ way to speak English: it just needs to be clear. I use standard English as a baseline accent for my coaching, but not because it’s some sort of ‘pure’ form of English.

Here are some interesting figures (mostly from Wikipedia, sorry):

·      Worldwide number of native English speakers:        373 million

·      Number of non-native English speakers:              1.08 billion

·      English speakers in the UK:                                             59 million

·      Native speakers of RP or standard English:                      1.5 million

Given that standard English is native to less that 0.1% of English speakers, it doesn’t make sense to think of it as ‘correct’ English.

What is standard English?

It’s easiest if I give examples: BBC journalists like Robert Peston, Mishal Husain and Clive Myrie all speak more or less ‘standard’ English. Not ‘the Queen’s English’, but neutral (ie. not from a particular region), ‘educated’ British English.

I use this accent as the main reference point for my coaching, for three reasons:

1) It’s not specific to any region or particular geographical area;

2) it’s widely understood throughout the UK and abroad;

3) there are some particular features of this accent that make it an effective medium for communicating: it has a lot of long expressive vowel sounds, distinct consonant sounds, and a solid confident-sounding pattern of intonation

Why do people want to change their accents?

People who do accent reduction training with me want to be fully in control of how they communicate. Occasionally they’re Brits who for whatever reason want to be able to tone down their a regional accent, but mostly it’s people who either speak English as a second or additional language, and are fully bilingual, or they’re native English speakers from a part of the world where the accent is unfamiliar to British ears, like India, Singapore or Nigeria.

They’ve often lived and worked in Britain for several years – this is their home. So it’s annoying to be made to feel like a foreigner - ’sorry, could you say that again?’ ’Sorry, didn’t quite catch that?’  
They just want to be clearly understood, so they can get on with their jobs and their lives; in Britain that means a finding a sound that’s closer to standard English than their natural accent.

You’ll notice I said ‘closer’ to standard English, not a flawless English accent. And that’s what is generally meant by ‘accent reduction’: we aim to get to a place where you’re easier to understand but you haven’t erased every trace of your natural accent, and the sense of identity that comes with that.

Surely it’s up to other people to get used to diverse ways of speaking?

I agree that in a way it doesn’t seem to right, in a diverse society, to be expected to change who you are. But I firmly believe it has nothing to do with discrimination.

It’s just a fact of life that some people don’t have a great ear for understanding different accents, and if your accent is different to that of the people around you, it helps to be able to meet them halfway.

So you learn how to put on a British accent?

Not at all. I don’t tell people how to speak. Accent reduction training gives you the ability to make conscious decisions about the way you speak, just as every morning you make a conscious decision about the way you dress. It’s still you, but a version of you that may find a more receptive audience and make your daily interactions easier.

Not only that, research from the University of Chicago shows that strong accents can harm your credibility. The study showed that people are less likely to believe statements when delivered in a strong foreign accent - and not because of cultural prejudices against particular nationalities, but because the statements are just harder to understand. 
Clarity means credibility: if your speaking bears a sound that most of the people you meet are familiar with, communication is smoother, easier and more successful.

Plus it’s a fundamental principle of being a good speaker that if you’re the one doing the talking, it’s your responsibility to make yourself understood: one of the first rules, no matter what your accent, is not to make your listeners work too hard. If they’re struggling to follow you, they’ll soon get tired, and they’ll stop listening. So if you can make it easy for them by using a sound that they recognise, you’ll automatically be more likely to hold their attention.

Contact me to book a free taster session and see how I can help you.