I’ve heard of courses to help people lose their accents, and it strikes me as terribly sad. I grew up in the South, and I have a Southern accent. If you think that makes me dumb, that’s your problem, not mine. Besides, it’s fun to watch folks’ reactions when I spout academic jargon interspersed with "y’all"s.
Oh, random note. In college, I hung out with a group of students from Finland. They said that it was much easier to understand the people from North Carolina than the people from up North. Maybe because we speak more slowly?
If your accent is Russian, then don’t lose it baby.
Those rock.
And remember that Mila Kunis learned English by watching Bob Barker ‘talk slow’ on the Price is Right.
I don’t mind accents if they are genuine.I’ve got a Welsh accent myself.
In the UK we have a film/theatre critic who has tried desperately to lose his Scottish accent. As his career has developed he has become a more and more plummy sounding Englishman but with the underlying accent of Scotland. It’s just impossible for me to take anything he says seriously.
V
I’ve got a very pronounced Texas drawl and it is just as strong today as it was when I left Texas in 1963. It’s part of me, part of who I am and where I’m from. If I lost it to “improve” myself, I would forever feel like a sell out.
I have just about no accent…except for when I get stressed out, in which case I end up with a bit of a Yawk/Jersey accent. This has been pointed out to me before, and it’s very irritating, seeing as I’m from Illinois.
I pick up accents like you wouldn’t believe, though. It’s really bad, because I’m always afraid that whoever I’m talking to is going to think I’m mocking them. I have a friend who stutters/stammers/whatever somewhat, for crying out loud, and when I’m with him, I have to consciously keep myself from not doing the same. Maddening.
I’m the not-necessarily-proud owner of a Long Island accent. It’s light/mild, yet noticeable; especially when I’m just talking with friends or family (I try to tone it down slightly when speaking to someone in a position of authority, such as a professor).
I think that the reason that my accent vexes me isn’t because I dislike it, but 'cause it seems that many who aren’t from Long Island already have a very clear (and unflattering) idea of what Long Islanders (especially young women) look and sound like; it seems that the accent either causes those people to stereotype the person with the accent or simply cements the negative stereotype already present. I suspect that people who have American southern accents can relate to what I’m saying.
Here’s a case in point: My closest friend - orginally from Westchester - was horrified at the realization that doing her undergrad & part of a grad degree on Long Island for almost six years has caused her to develop a Long Island accent when saying certain words (e.g. ‘coffee’, ‘mall’, and Wantagh [the name of a town - she claims the corect pronunciation is 'WAN-tah, but most Long Islanders say ‘WAN-taw’]). IOW, it’s not a case of incorrect word usage or pronunciation (i.e. not about saying ‘axe’ when the word ‘ask’ should be used, or putting the ac-CENT on the wrong syl-LAB-le). I’ll have to inquire as to what precisely about the accent bugs her so.
Reading this over, I’m annoyed with myself that I care this much about what people think of my accent. 
Despite my new effort to not care what people think of my accent (whether good thoughts or bad), I’ll put it to those of you who’ve heard a Long Island accent: What does a Long Island accent imply to you, if anything?
I’m not sure what it means to have no accent.
The only time I’m aware of my accent is when I hear my voice recorded or, sometimes, when I’ve been drinking it seems to blossom. Which tells me that, although it is apparently present enough that it draws a comment from time to time when I’m elsewhere, it doesn’t impede communication.
It’s a southeast Texas drawl, and I’ve never ever had the feeling that it represented any kind of social liability. If someone’s inclined to devalue what I represent because I don’t sound like them, I don’t really need’em anyway.
I have an extremely mixed accent.
Take a South Texas drawl, mix in a Hispanic community (even though I am not Hispanic), and add a little bit of LA.
Speaking, I end sentences in “no?” “verdad?” and the like (but only when engrossed in the conversation). Also, I have two syllable pronunciations for one syllable words.
My friends say the more tired I am, or the more relaxed I am, the more Southern I sound.
My little cousin from OKC but raised for a whle in the Rio Grand Valley is the only family member that sounds even remotely like me.
Go figure.
Right you are!
I was raised in Ann Arbor and I, of course, didn’t think we had accents. After many years in the East, I finally began to detect the Michigan accent on visits to Michigan. It’s very subtle (close to the broadcast English), but the R’s seem to be a little strong. There are still givaways in my own speech: For example, I pronounce the “oo” in “roof” like “soot”, while in the East, folks say it like “oo” in “root”.
If people can’t understand what you’re saying, it’s probably a good idea to do something about it if it bothers you. I’m an Aussie and I quite often get picked as being a Brit. I don’t think I sound British, but maybe it’s because I hear myself differently.
Interesting observation NoClueBoy. My little sister went to boarding schools and a convent until she went to college In New Orleans. She’s been there 25 years now, and sounds like a native. My closest siblings (younger brother, older sister) left Texas as soon as they could and have both been in New Mexico for 12 or so years. I can hear New Mexico taking root in my brother. I could go on with the rest of my family, but I think the point’s made.
One thing I think is also a factor in how an accent is perceived is whether or not one uses regional idioms, something to which I’m not given.
If you hadn’t said “film/theatre critic” I would have sworn you were talking about Niall Ferguson.
A small world, this is…
I know Dr. Ferguson very well. He was my college advisor at Jesus College, Oxford. (One day I will have to start a thread in Great Debates about Empire. I always found him to be a friendly person IRL, someone who encouraged me to finish my thesis in the face of a lot of trouble, who has a habit of rubbing people the wrong way with his books. I think his biggest fault is that he’s writing popular books without thinking about what the popular media is going to say about them…but as I say that’s for another thread.)
I disagree with this assessment of his accent. Since I first met him in 1995, I don’t think his accent has changed appreciably, and there were a lot of Oxford types whose accents did change dramatically after they got there. Mostly students, but some lecturers. (No, I’m not naming any names. )
I, too, got the same kind of treatment that ruadh discusses about having an American accent. My experience was greatly magnified since I was studying British history, and was one of the few Americans around taking the course. Fortunately, after only a year my own accent had changed pretty dramatically, to the point where no-one could place my accent any more. (Common wrong answers to where I was from: Canada, Ireland, Wales, Germany (!), India (!!).) As late as last year, I was still talking with a half-English accent, but now it’s all but gone.
Duke, I’m sure he’s a lovely fellow but FFS he’s from Glasgow - I guarantee you that nobody from Glasgow speaks like that naturally. (In fact, I’m not sure anybody from anywhere does.) I was watching him being interviewed on the TV here about his new book, you know the one in which he claims that British imperialism was a good thing for Ireland and other countries, and I actually found him painful to listen to, even apart from the load of rubbish he was talking 
There are folks around here that try to exagerate their accent (the Wailing Banshee) and I hate it. Like it makes them sound cuter or something. I try not to use the high “i” (rice, ice) and not make “ass” = “ice” and never ever say “cain’t”.
If I get drunk or pissed off though, watch out.
Ow kech up wid y’all laider, aight?
I have a friend who worked hard to eliminate the more “dramatic” parts of his accent (he lives in Maine), simply because he personally hated the sound of it. I used to have a Midwestern-blend accent (having lived in a couple places in Wisconsin, then Minneapolis, then moving to the Chicago suburbs), but it’s shifted to a mild suburban Chicago accent over time. This wasn’t intentional on my part; it just happened. I did work to eliminate certain regionalisms from my speech, though, as I didn’t like them.
My father lost his Leicester accent when he was at drama school in the mid 1960s. The students did a lot of work on phonetics as well as their voice exercises, and in those days they were taught to speak in a standard English accent.
My mother lost her accent (which, judging by the rest of her family, I assume sounded straight out of the Sopranos) when she went off to graduate school in Berkeley. She had to take speech therapy there - I can’t recall exactly why - and her therapist was English, so apparently she developed a bit of an English accent for a time. She tells me my grandmother once asked her how come she was talking so high-falutin’ since she’d gone off to grad school
Now she mostly has the standard indistinguishable American accent, although you do hear the occasional Joysey pronunciation, particularly after she’s had a few black russians …
Some people go the other way. One example is the violinist Nigel Kennedy. I have seen some TV recordings of him when he was about ten years old and he spoke with a slightly “posh” accent. Now he speaks with a pseudo cockney or estuary English accent. Perhaps this is part of the dumbing down process that is happening to classical music.