How you speak is important.  But is it important to have a posh accent?

Accents are important because they indicate something about you – where you come from and who you spend time with. They are important too because they make it easier or more difficult for you to be understood.

A regional accent may no longer mark you out, as it used to do in the UK, as uneducated. But if you speak with a strong regional accent it probably indicates that you don’t regularly communicate with people from other places. If you did, you would have had to reduce your “home” accent to be more easily understood.

Some people are better at talking posh

Here’s a recording of  Tawainese singer aping the old fashioned posh accent of British private schools in the 1950’s click to hear “I went to school in Cheltenham“. I went to that same school at the end of the 1960’s and my friends and I certainly didn’t speak posh like that! In fact nobody did.

Still, it’s interesting to note that she is Taiwanese and yet there is no trace at all of a Taiwanese accent. I don’t know if she went to this school, another private school in the UK or whether, like any professional singer or actor, she can perform in any language or accent.

How easy is it to lose your native accent?

In my opinion losing your accent depends to a large extent on your motivation. And it depends to a certain extent on your ear, the natural ability to hear different nuances and copy them, and on your age.

For a student attending Oxford University back in the 1960’s with a Londoner’s Cockney accent meant a certain amount of social exclusion, so it was relatively easy to quickly “lose” your accent and talk like the RP, private-school educated majority of students then. The student was probably just 18.

Similarly, some teenagers from abroad who attend a British boarding school for a couple of years may sound exactly like their British peers at the end of it. But if those teenagers had spent 6 or 7 school years in a UK school they would have picked up an identical accent to their peers. Again these are young people, with fewer years of ingrained speech habits to replace.

Change the goalposts

For older people, to completely lose your accent is hard. Instead, change the goalposts: make your goal learning to speak clearly so that you are easily understood. You don’t need to eliminate your original accent entirely. I usually advise clients to:

• keep your accent but reduce it
• learn to approximate an accepted widely-understood model (eg educated Southern English or RP)
• learn to speak with clear diction
• enunciate clearly
• make an effort to be clear and easily understood

This is a much quicker job.

You still need to want to be easily understood, practise new speech habits and accept feedback. New speech habits may include changing any or all of these:

• phonetics (vowel and consonant sounds)
• intonation
• pitch
• speed
• elision
• diction or enunciation
• word choice
• stress or emphasis

 Next step

To find out more about “speaking posh” or to improve your impact and influence click here. We’ve got a range of experience and expertise to help you speaking more clearly, engage others and make the impact you want to make.

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