Learning a new accent is really a case of rewiring your brain.

For some people this is easier than for others, for most people it takes a lot of work. However, it is definitely possible! There are three main features that one should keep in mind when looking to reduce their accent and move towards a neutral English accent. The first is that your native language and neutral English (known as Received Pronunciation or RP) will have a different set of vowel sounds. These are not the vowels they teach you in school, these are the sounds that make up words, and very few places teach them, they are more something we assume when we learn a language. When you learn English, you learn the words and grammar, but not the details of the sounds that make up those words, which is why so many people are fluent in English and still have the frustration of being misunderstood. There are twelve main vowel sounds in English and they all have a unique position with the mouth, lips and tongue in a certain place. Learn the position and you will learn the sound. The next challenge is to recognize the sounds in words! There are seven secondary vowel sounds, called diphthongs, they are made up of two vowel sounds together. Vowels have different characteristics, but the main difference between vowel sounds is whether they are long or short, and getting the vowel length right makes a huge difference in understanding.

The second stress reduction factor is consonants, in your native language you may have a slightly different set of consonants and therefore not be familiar with all consonant sounds in English. This can lead to a lot of confusion, and in English, when consonants are incorrect or mixed with other consonants, the words can have completely different meanings or just sound strange to the English ear. For example, the sounds ‘wyv’ often cause confusion for German or Arabic speakers, such as velo and whale, and the two are often mixed. While Asian speakers may find the differentiation between ‘l’ and ‘r’ particularly difficult.

To make things more confusing in English, we have voiced and voiceless versions of the same sounds, which means that while the mouth is in exactly the same position to make a sound, the voiceless sound is made only by breathing, and the voiced sound is with the vocal cords activated. You can test this for yourself by putting two fingers to your throat and then alternating between ‘SSSSS’ and ‘ZZZZZ’. Can you feel your throat vibrate a little to the ZZZZ sound? Those are the activated vocal cords. It can be confusing at times, especially when the voiced and non-voiced versions are written with the same letters. As with ‘TH. Think about the ‘TH’ sound in ‘thirsty’ and now the ‘TH’ sound in ‘then’. One is voiced and the other is deaf. Can you tell which is which?

Now for the third factor of learning the English accent; accent and intonation. This is a huge and complex area, but in a sense, the most exciting. It is here that the melody of spoken English comes to life. There are two distinct areas here, word stress and sentence stress. By ‘stress’ we mean words or syllables that are given extra stress. You can add this ’emphasis’ by going higher, higher, or longer on the stressed syllable of the stressed word. So let’s take the word TOMORROW for example. The stress is on the first syllable.

Now let’s try to accentuate it by making it louder: MORNING ing.
Now try to make it longer M.. O.. R.. Ning
Now try to make it higher in the morning.

Good! Now some rules. First, each word has its unique stress pattern. This means that stress doesn’t just change randomly based on the speaker’s mood. If a word is not stressed according to its unique stress pattern, it just sounds weird. In fact, this is one of the big differences between native and non-native speakers, and even when a person is fluent and has barely any accent, it can be the accent on the word that gives them away. Second, every word of two syllables or more will have a primary stressed syllable and an unstressed syllable. In a sense, you can think of it as having a master and a slave. In the word Morning, the first syllable MORN is the master and the second syllable ING is the slave.

Now the second thing to know is that the unstressed syllable is most commonly made up of a small vowel sound that is more of a growl. This growl is not only the most common vowel sound in the English language, but it also has its own name. It’s called SCHWA. If you open your mouth a little, but keep your jaw completely relaxed, and now you make a sound. It should come out as ‘UH” and that’s the schwa. The Schwa can appear at the beginning of words like ‘away’ (try it: UH WAY) and ‘about’ (UH BOUT) and at the end of words like runner, (RUN NUH) or Winter (WINT UH). It can also appear in the middle of words like Saturday (SAT UH DAY).

Take a look at the following words and see if you can spot the SCHWA.
Banana, doctor, America, lever, garden, paper, low, support, figure, glamour, measure, document.

Keep in mind that it gets a little harder to recognize with longer words, but that’s okay, you’ll get used to it!

When some of these word and sentence stress concepts are grasped, the speaker holds the key to unlocking the melody of spoken English. This skill, along with learning to make and recognize accurate sounds, is the path to successful accent reduction. It’s pretty hard work, but with practice it’s very possible, and it can even be quite fun!