Can You Change (or Save) Your Accent?

Your accent says a lot about you: It tells someone where you were raised, hints at your ethnicity, and gives out clues about your social class and economic circumstances. Even though the details of your life obviously change long after your accent is “set,” there is still a lot people can guess about you from the way you speak.

And yes, you do have an accent. People who haven’t moved outside their local area much sometimes think they don’t have any sort of accent, but that’s a fallacy. We all pronounce words a certain way, use specific rhythms, and employ common vowel and consonant sounds in a way that’s typically tied to the region and culture we grow up in. That’s because we learn to speak by listening, and it’s generally believed that by the age of 7, your accent is kind of baked in. In fact, your accent is very specifically you: Some linguists believe we all speak with what’s known as an “idiolect,” a unique way of speaking that is specific to us.

Considering how revealing an accent can be — and the proven fact that accent bias exists — it’s not surprising that people sometimes seek to change their accents. But is it possible to totally alter the way that you speak so that your natural accent is eradicated?

How hard is it to change your accent?

You can change your accent and, in fact, many of us do so unconsciously all the time. Just about everyone code-switches in different scenarios, whether it’s at work or with a different group of friends. Hanging out with people from the old block can suddenly thicken an accent that had softened, for example, and we all have that friend who spent a summer or gap year abroad and came home with a bizarre new accent that made us roll our eyes and whisper things behind their back.

And of course, professional actors manage to convincingly alter their accents all the time. Sure, they have access to expensive dialect coaches and have millions of motivations for putting in the required work — and they only have to manage a few lines of dialog at a time — but it’s still proof that you can, in fact, change your accent if you work at it.

It isn’t easy, though. Most people who spend time abroad and think they’ve adopted a new accent are actually speaking a muddled jumble of accents (and as Madonna proved a few years ago, they are fooling absolutely nobody). Changing your accent involves changing every aspect of your speech, and that isn’t easily done. Chances are even if you get pretty good, you still won’t ever fool native speakers — you’ll always have a distinct “tell” that gives it away.

How to speak with a different accent

OK, you’re a “challenge accepted” type, and the perfect should never be the enemy of the good and all that. You want to change your accent even if it’s never going to be a perfect transformation. Here’s how you can do it:

• Attend a speech workshop. There are established schools that focus on accent reduction and modification. Dialect coaches will work with you to alter your accent. Keep in mind this can be a long process: It will begin with a round of tests and exercises to catalogue how you speak, in order to identify what needs to change, and the entire process can take months or years depending on whether you’re seeking just a small modification or an entirely new accent.
• DIY it with immersion. Picking up a new accent involves two fundamental strategies: Listening to people speaking with that accent, and practicing your pronunciation. Finding videos and podcasts where people speak in your desired accent and then repeating everything they say is a good way to not only hear the differences in accents but train your mouth and throat to make the appropriate sounds — which can sometimes be very challenging.
• Tongue-twisters. Accents have a habit of reverting to their natural state when we’re stressed, so stressing yourself is a good way to get used to a new accent. Tongue-twisters are an incredible challenge in your natural language, so tackling them while paying attention to your new accent will help sear it into your brain.

How to keep your accent

It might be hard to totally change your accent, but it’s equally difficult to avoid accent-creep when you’re immersed in another language or accent. If everyone around you is speaking in an accent, you might pick up a bit of the flare. And maybe you don’t want to, because you don’t want to be mocked and accused of appropriation or just general dumbness. So how can you prevent your accent from changing?

It’s actually harder to prevent your accent from changing when you’re in a new environment than it is to consciously change your accent. That’s because we’re all kind of naturally wired to pick up new accents — in part because it will make us easier to understand, and in part because we psychologically mimic people around us in something called the Chameleon Effect.

There are two things you can do to prevent unintentional “accent drift”:

• Stay connected. Speak regularly with people from your native area in order to reinforce your accent, or immerse yourself in your native TV and podcasts in order to keep hearing the accent you love.
• Stay mindful. Pay attention to how you speak, and watch for accent creep. This process is often unconscious, so paying close attention to how you’re speaking and pronouncing things will help defend against suddenly waking up with an outrageous French accent.

There’s a lot of evidence that accents are actually starting to blend together in different regions, possibly as the beginning of a process where all regional accents are blurring together. This means you might not need to worry so much about your accent if you can just manage to live long enough.