The goal of American accent training is not to alter a client's manner of speaking in any radical way or to eliminate an accent all together. This is impossible. In any case, an accent is an essential part of a speaker's personal identity. American accent training strives to reduce individual accents while simultaneously giving individuals [...]
Accent Reduction Programs: Identifying Regional Accents in the US Effective communication is a key to success in all industries. Regardless of how efficiently a company is run, any lapse in how information is being shared automatically affects the line of communication between employees and subordinates and vice-versa. Miscommunication can potentially lead to critical misunderstandings. Accent reduction [...]
How to lose your accent The term African American Vernacular English (AAVE) became popular in the mid to late 1980's as a way to describe the unique pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and substitution patterns used by African Americans which make this speech pattern something beyond a simple dialect. For instance, a person using African American Vernacular [...]
Accent Reduction Training: Increasingly Localized As was discussed in a previous article, the standard California accent is thought to be closest in tone to the standard American English spoken throughout the Midwest and emphasized in accent reduction training. A direct result of Midwestern settlers migrating to San Francisco during the gold rush period from 1848-1855. [...]
American Dialects in California Upon closer inspection, the American accents and American dialects found in the cities and towns that comprise California have proven to be relatively resistant to the broad generalizations which characterize dialect zones linguists use to divide the United States. California experienced a massive influx of English speakers and immigrants from other [...]
Searching for Lincoln"s True Voice The first phonograph (a device to record and playback sounds) was invented by Thomas Alva Edison in 1877, twelve years after the death of Abraham Lincoln. As such, no recording of Abraham Lincoln"s legendary speeches exists to highlight those variables which contributed to Lincoln"s status as one of the great [...]
Speech in "The Big Apple" The New York City accent is one of the most polarizing regional accents found in the United States. Some people believe the accent to be an extension of the speaker"s presumed "tough" personality, a stereotypical trait that has been broadly applied to all New Yorkers by non natives. Although the [...]
Individuals who speak standard American English are usually able to notice when someone else speaks with a different, more foreign accent. However, these American English-speaking individuals may sometimes believe their own way of speaking contains no accent at all, when in turn, it actually does. What most of these native English speakers don’t realize is [...]
Today, knowing and understanding the English language is a necessity in order to communicate throughout many countries, especially in the United States. Learning standard American English may take a lot of practice and time, but in the end, you will be rewarded with many more opportunities in your professional and personal life. Understanding English will [...]
There are several different American accents that are used across the nation and there are even more dialects. Some people believe accents and dialects have the same meaning, but they are actually quite different. Accents are strictly related to the pronunciation of sounds in speech, and dialect involves not only pronunciation, but vocabulary and grammar [...]
