Is it Possible to Speak English Without an Accent?

By Jennie Parker

This blog post first appeared in English Unraveled on the Service Speak, LLC site on July 21, 2017.

In 2005, when I was training to be an English instructor at the British Council in Istanbul, our trainer, who was a native English speaker from Tasmania, always teased me and another Midwestern American classmate about the way we referred to "you" in plural form: "you guys." He'd say, there's no "guys" in the grammar books! And years later, when I started teaching English in Atlanta, Georgia, my "you guys" gradually changed to "y'all." This is one example of dialectical variation within the United States.  Some estimate there are over 24 different English dialects in the United States alone. Dialect includes not only word choice and grammar, but pronunciation, as well.

Therefore, I am always amused when English language learners say their goal is to speak English without an accent.  While I applaud such learners for their ambition and motivation, it would be impossible for anyone - even native speakers - to speak without an accent.  A more realistic goal would be to speak English with a clear accent.  In the United States, when English language learners refer to "English without an accent," they may be referring to General American, the dialect of English that they often hear in media, particularly national radio or television broadcasts. This dialect is often found in the central region of the United States though it is worth noting that even within this area, variations of speech exist (see map below).
​
​So, what makes an accent clear?  The short answer is that a clear accent is easily understood by others.  This may seem simple, but if you've learned English in your home country and re-located to the United States, you may be surprised by how UNCLEAR native English speakers seem to you.  That's probably because the textbook English that you learned is very different from how native speakers actually talk. 

---

In addition to using slang and idiomatic expressions, most native speakers of American English do the following when they speak:

• Connect sounds. Sometimes it's difficult to hear where one word ends and another begins. For example, in the sentence,"I told you," the underlined "d" and "you" are often connected, and the resulting sound is /dʒu/, which sounds kind of like "joo." Another example can be seen in the phrase, "black and white." In spoken English, the "a" and "d" are usually dropped, resulting in, "black'n'white." (Listen)
• Drop syllables. Several words in English drop syllables. This sometimes occurs with unstressed syllables in words with three or more syllables. Examples of this are chocolate (/tʃɔk-lət/), evening (/iv-nɪŋ/), and business (/bɪz-nəs/). Each of the underlined vowel sounds is dropped. (Listen)
• Stress syllables within words accurately. Native speakers almost always use proper word stress (unless a word is unfamiliar to them). Several rules guide word stress. One example is when a two-syllable word can be both a noun and a verb, the first syllable is usually stressed in noun form (e.g., "put on the RE-cord"), and the second syllable is usually stressed in verb form (e.g., "re-CORD your voice"). (Listen)
• Use a somewhat predictable pattern of rhythm and intonation. Rhythm and intonation contribute to the "musicality" of English. Whereas word stress indicates which syllable of a word is stressed, rhythm involves which words within a phrase or sentence are stressed. Intonation, on the other hand, refers to the pitch patterns over phrases or sentences. English rhythm and intonation come naturally to a native speaker, but, luckily, these patterns can be studied and learned.
• Articulate roughly 44 distinct sounds. There are approximately 44 sounds in the English language. This is an estimate because our dialects affect how we pronounce specific phonemes (i.e., distinct units of sound that distinguish one utterance from another in a language), and the placement of phonemes in a word relative to other phonemes also affects how they sound. However, despite the existence of over 40 phonemes in English, there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. Therefore, the spelling of a word is not always a great indication of how it is pronounced. A simple example of this can be seen in the words "go" (/go/) and "do" (/du/). Though the placement of the "o" in these words is identical, the sound is very different. (Listen)

If you are not doing these five things in your speech, your accent will not be easily understood by native English speakers, and you might have to repeat yourself often.  The good news is that these features can be learned. So, rather than trying to learn to speak with "no accent," I encourage you to define the accent you want to emulate (for English language learners living in the United States, this might be General American) and develop concrete goals for how close to that accent you want your speech to be. For example, is your goal to be understood by native English speakers at least 90% of the time? Or do you want to sound just like your American neighbors?

Map of General American English: A rough Guide

This illustration was created by M0tty.  [By Map_of_American_urban_areas_by_size.svg: *Carte_des_villes_américaines.svg: historicair 20:27, 13 November 2006 (UTC) derivative work: JWB (talk) General_American.png: UserAngr derivative work: M0tty [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]