Why Accent Doesn’t Matter

I hear it from students all the time. “I need to get rid of my accent.” Or “I need sound like a real British person” There’s a whole cottage industry of people “teaching” real native accents. The problem is that accent doesn’t matter! Comprehensibility does! And don’t tell anyone, but prosody is a far larger determiner of how well understood you are than accent is. In this article, I’m going to talk about what prosody is and why it matters. But first I’m going to explain exactly why your accent doesn’t matter and deconstruct native speakerism in a few steps!

Foreigners Have Native Accents

The argument for a “real native English accent” is easy to refute. Start with the fact that a lot of those “real native accent” videos are taught by people who aren’t technically native speakers.

I was just watching a video series by a Nigerian gentleman with so many comments about how he had a perfect “native” accent. He did indeed have a mastery of RP, often considered the gold standard of proper English speech and easily heard in BBC news broadcasts. That may be for a variety of reasons. In fact, Nigerians can be considered native speakers. Kids in Nigeria often learn English at a very young age and it is a former British colony. Certainly the teacher on the video was a fluent and proficient speaker. And that’s the point! If a gentleman in Nigeria has a desirable “native” accent, then obviously native means more than just British or American—something most students would never admit to.

Native Speakers Don’t Always Have Native Accents

The funny thing is that many people all over the world learn English from birth and thus are native speakers. That includes people born in India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and so on. Yet somehow, native speaker accent doesn’t include English spoken in Mumbai! I’ve never had anyone ask to speak more like a Canadian or a Texan or even a New Englander (but Pepperidge Farm remembers)! Native doesn’t mean West Country England, Scotland, or Ireland. Nor Australia. So native speakers aren’t even native speakers. (more…)