Regional Accents and Speaking English

by Judy Young

When one is learning a new language, there are several factors that are important in ensuring the sounds are able to be correctly learned. One of these has to do with listening to the sounds as they are pronounced, and duplicating these sounds.

The United States has many regions, all with different accents for that region. Even among Americans, these can be difficult to understand from one region to another. Southern accents tend to draw out vowel sounds and twist the sounds in different ways, such as the word "dog," which is pronounced "daawg" or "daowg." In the Northeast, around New York, the pronunciation of "dog" sounds like "doog" or "dooag," or even "dzooag." The Southeast and Southwest regions of the U.S. tend also to speak more slowly than residents of the Northeast, who tend to speak at a much quicker pace.

I know a man whose father came over from Sweden. As he was learning how to speak English, he lived close to some people from China and he also had neighbors from Mexico. Needless to say, he had some very different ways to pronounce words in English, as he was learning from people who had their own country's accents.

There is another factor; and that is, unfortunately, that a number of Americans just don't speak English that well. They sometimes slur words (sloppy, unclear speech) and sometimes drop sounds from the ends of words or talk too rapidly to be easily understood by anyone.

So, how does one learn correctly? There is a method of speech training called Standard American Speech. Many actors and TV personalities learn this technique. It is a form of speaking English that has no regional accent to it, and teaches one to speak the sounds, exactly and correctly. This is not a difficult thing to learn, and has often helped people to understand English better, as they can now recognize the sounds of English better, even when someone can't say things in English that well or understandably.