123 - Should You Change Your Accent?

So today we're talking all about accent and whether you need to change it or not.

Okay so we should probably start by defining something right because people often get accent and pronunciation mixed up so let's talk about what they actually mean right so pronunciation is like how you produce the spoken language, right? How the sounds come out of your mouth.

And this is like the individual sounds.

But it also includes things like stress, rhythm, intonation, and all that stuff, right? So how you actually physically make the sounds is pronunciation.

Now, accent is how production varies from the standard based on things like the region that you're from or the community that you're a part of or the background of your language learning, right? So basically, pronunciation is the how to produce it and the accent is how that varies from place to place, right? Now, there is some overlap.

There's a lot of stuff like everybody's got an accent of some kind.

They're not completely separate.

I'll give you a good example of this.

In England, we've got something called the north-south divide, right? Where people in the north who have northern accents like mine, we will say words like bath and trap with the same a sound, right? However, in the south, people with southern accents, you're more likely to hear bath and trap with different vowel sounds.

both are correct both are very common one is not better than the other right so the pronunciation is different fundamentally but they're both okay because the accent variation from the standard right so i think understanding that these two points are different accent and pronunciation are not the same thing there's a bit of crossover but they are separate right So when people tell me that they want to change their accent, I often ask them, why? Why do you want to change your accent, right? And there's usually three main situations that this happens.