Your voice: how do you find your accent(s)?

Hello again, I've just had an interesting comment by a loyal reader of mine who talked about how her Singaporean accent has affected her IELTS (International English Language Testing System) score and whilst they've not failed her because of her accent, she has unfortunately failed to score high enough to get work in Australia as a teacher, much to her frustration. She has asked me for help but since I'm on the other side of the world in London, I am simply not in a position to help as much as I'd like to - but her problem is this: how does she modify her accent to make herself to be a lot more easily understood by the people she has to work with in Australia? Since I don't even know what she sounds like in the first place, sadly I'm simply not in a position to assist - but since I have been through this journey myself, I can only talk about my own experience. I was born and bred in Singapore where I have spent the first 21 years of my life, but I then spent the next 21 years 6 months in Europe and the Middle East, so I have spent more of my life outside Singapore than in Singapore. When I first left Singapore in 1997, I did have a Singaporean accent (not a particularly strong one, but a rather Americanized one) but today I do sound somewhat different and my accent has evolved a lot over the years.

Now I would say that I have two quite different accents: one is the one I use for work, which is modeled upon the British aristocracy in which I go out of my way to sound posh. I would never speak like that with friends, but it is my "work voice". It is modeled upon some people I know and for example, there's this English lawyer called David who is so very posh, he is leaving part of his estate in his will to his college at Oxford University. I pick David because he's in his 60s, so when he speaks there's a certain kind of gravitas to his voice which makes him sound very much the part of the wise old man and I want to capture that gravitas - I imagine that if my clients spoke to David, they would view him as their social equal or superior, they would trust him and I want to reproduce that quality. Then there's "Alex's voice" which is the way I speak to my friends in a relaxed environment, I would also speak like that to my colleagues whom I am very comfortable with. Now our accent in English is influenced by the other languages we do speak on a daily basis and I am quite the exception here because I speak 20 languages and use at least about 5 to 7 on a daily basis. So if I had been speaking a lot of Italian or Spanish, I would find myself rolling my Rs quite aggressively when I switch back to English. I also use a variety of loanwords from several languages partly because I am showing off but sometimes the thoughts just come to my head in another language and I would rather voice the original thought than to have to translate it back into English. I am quite comfortable with "Alex's voice" because it is a true reflection of my linguistic identity, having so many influences. In my Youtube videos, I do speak with "Alex's voice" because I think it comes across as a lot more sincere and genuine.

"Alex's voice" is a work in progress - I am always learning a new language and trying to improve the ones I already speak. How I sound ten years from now in 2028 will probably be different again, depending on where I live, whom I'm working with and which new languages I am learning. However, my "work voice" has been pretty much set in stone since I've picked David the person whose accent I am going to mimic. Indeed, my "work voice" has improved over the years - it's what actors do, the longer the play a role, the better they get at playing that character. I have been playing "David, the posh English lawyer from Sloane Square" for quite a while already and whilst some may call it mimicry, I call it acting. I only play that part at work because my company is paying me good money to deal with clients and I'm being paid to represent my company in the best possible light, that means playing the character they would most want to deal with rather than trying to be myself. There isn't a one size fits all approach to this - often I am also dealing with people who are non-native speakers of English and I may or may not even be speaking English with them. So take my Spanish friend Nuria for example, we speak in a mix of English and Spanish, switching back and forth between the two languages. But when we do switch to English, I would use "Alex voice" with her rather than my "work voice" because I believe that "Alex voice" would be better received by a Spanish person as the accent isn't tied to one particular country and Nuria speaks English with a Spanish accent anyway, so using my "work voice" is hardly going to establish rapport with her in English.

Now the key difference between my "work voice" and "Alex's voice" is that I am constantly trying very hard to sound just like David with my "work voice", whilst with "Alex's voice", I just speak the way I want, the way which comes most naturally to me and I am not trying to be someone else. However, the reason why I don't have the same accent as say my sister (hey, same family, same mother tongue situation, same kind of primary and secondary education in Singapore) is because I have spent the last 21 years 6 months in Europe surrounded by people speaking a variety of European languages, rather than Chinese speaking people. My sister on the other hand, has spent the last 21 years (in fact all of her life) in Singapore and both my family and her husband's family are very much Mandarin speaking; so whilst my sister is highly educated and writes English flawlessly, she does have a stronger Chinese accent because she is constantly using Mandarin (and a little Hokkien) on a daily basis whilst I really don't have anyone here in London to speak Chinese with. But more to the point, I am not trying to make my accent sound like my sister the way I am trying to make my "work voice" sound like David. In fact virtually no effort goes into "Alex's voice" as that's a genuine, most honest reflection of the way I think - that's when I'm truly just being me. So is it a particular nice accent? No, but I don't think that's important - it is simply not an accent that I would want to use at work, especially when dealing with clients. So in today's post I am focusing more on my "work voice" and I shall also be talking about a few basic principles about modifying one's accent.

1. What is your natural accent? How do you sound to others?

If you went to see a doctor, the first step of any consultation would be the diagnosis - what are we dealing with here? To get an accurate diagnosis, we need to analyze the symptoms. So in the first instance, it would be useful to get some very honest feedback about the way you sound. The first thing to do would be to do a recording of yourself reading out aloud and then listening back to the recording. But then, you'll need an independent opinion, rather than a biased one to get an accurate evaluation. Imagine you went to a good friend and instead of trying to be honest with the way you sound, she is more concerned about not hurting your feelings. But her motivation to give you that feedback is to make you feel better, rather than it being any kind of accurate reflection on the way you sound. The good news is that once you have identified your natural accent, it then becomes a lot easier to address some of the most common issues associated with your accent. Whilst everyone's accent is as unique as their fingerprints, there will be certain common patterns. The key reason why we have an accent when we speak English is because we speak another language and that other language strongly influences the way we speak English. So for example, many Korean people typically struggle with the letter Vs and Fs because they don't exist in Korean - ironic that one of the most popular loanwords from English in Korean is 'fighting' (which is used as an encouragement, not unlike 加油 in Chinese), but that usually comes out of 'hwaiting'. That should be a phrase that should be rather familiar to you if you are a fan of Korean culture, especially if you enjoy your K-dramas.

And of course, if you are surrounded by people speaking English with a certain accent, then you are most likely to end up copying each other subconsciously because the accent starts to feel normal when everyone around you is speaking in the same manner. I remember when I was in primary school in Singapore, everyone including the teacher spoke with a rather strong Singaporean accent so naturally, that was my accent. It wasn't a deliberate choice on my part, that was just the way everyone spoke in that school. Identifying your accent is actually a very important step because if you want to change your accent, then you want to know what you're working with in the first place. A lot of people are actually in denial about the fact that they have an accent: when I first came to the UK, I was totally in denial that I had a Singaporean accent because in my mind, a true Singaporean accent would be the kind of English an older Chinese Ah Soh would use to communicate with an Indian or Malay customer in a hawker centre in Tampines - and so I thought, "well I don't speak like that and compared to the Ah Soh in Tampines, clearly I don't really have a Singaporean accent." But nonetheless, I did have an accent which distinctly made me sound like a foreigner in the UK and it took me 8 years before I was even willing to acknowledge that; that was when I met my voice coach who helped me change my accent.

This reminded me of an incident on my flight from Orlando to Puerto Rico a few years back - I sat in front of two American ladies who were talking about their friend 'Angela' who had put on a lot of weight. I eavesdropped on their rather bitchy conversation without turning around, but it seems that their friend Angela had broken up with her boyfriend some months back and she had let herself go since, by drowning her sorrows in food and drink.  Apparently Angela had become so fat that none of her old clothes fit her anymore so she had to go and buy a whole new wardrobe. So when I got up to go to the toilet halfway through the flight, I had the chance to finally see what these two ladies looked like: they had fallen asleep by then but good grief, neither of them were thin - they were fat, they were overweight. And I thought, okay, I wasn't expecting this, I thought they were two skinny mean girls bitching about a fat friend but surely you would have expressed some empathy to your friend Angela since she is now fat like you? But then of course, I could guess what was going on: these two ladies were fat, but not as far as their friend Angela who must have been even larger than them. So if you want to feel thin, you bitch about someone who is fatter than you. I may mock the two fat ladies on the flight, but how was that any different from what I did by comparing my Singaporean accent to the imaginary Ah Soh in Tampines who had a stereotypical Singaporean accent (not unlike the one featured in the Youtube clip above). You see, the power of denial can create incredibly huge blind spots: both the fat American ladies on the flight and I fell prey to it.

2. Why do you want to change your accent? 

This is an important consideration: why do you want to change your accent? I think the most common reason that people want to do that is to improve their employment prospects or for career advancement but it could be for other personal reasons as well. How important your accent is in that aspect really depends on the kind of work you do - a computer programmer would sit behind his computer all day coding, so his accent is hardly important compared to the quality of his coding, whereas for a salesman like me who has to do a lot of networking and do many sales pitches, the way my accent makes me sound plays a huge part in how successful I am at my job. I would compare it to driving: now I do have a license and I can drive, but I'm hardly a good driver. I would describe myself as a nervous, very cautious and slow driver because I have not had enough practice. I live in central London and do not own a car, since I don't need one. Does my limited ability to drive impede my ability to do my job? No, because I can use public transport to get to where I need to be for work - whereas a taxi driver or a bus driver's ability to do their job well would clearly be dependent on their ability to drive well. Would I be able to do the work a taxi driver does? No, no way! Driving for so many hours a day would just totally stress me out as I am not a confident driver! Therefore, it would be useful to analyze if you're indeed in a situation where you really need to change your accent or not. Perhaps you need to do it urgently, perhaps you don't need to at all.

3. What is your ideal result? 

So really, the question you need to answer is this: if you're changing your accent, what is the ideal outcome? For whom are you changing it for? Once you have identified and defined your objective, then it is time to work backwards to figure how to get from where you are to where you would like to be. So in the case of my reader who wants to qualify as a teacher in Australia, her goal would be to have an accent that sounds a lot more Australian, something that the Australian students will be very familiar with and not have any difficulty in understanding. But having spent time in Australia, I realize that there isn't one Australian accent but a multitude of accents local to Australia - the accent of a farmer in the remote outback in Western Australia would sound nothing like the well educated Australian elite in the major cities So perhaps she should pick someone like former PM Julia Gillard, a woman who commanded so much respect around the world and sounds very articulate whilst having a distinctly Australian accent. If a teacher were to speak like Julia Gillard in the classroom, she would most certainly command the attention of her students and be able to establish her authority very quickly. This is of course, very different from my 'work voice' for a simple reason: I'm not trying to sell to Australians, I spend most of the time dealing with people in the UK so I have picked my English lawyer friend David as the person I would like to mimic in this exercise as that is the kind of person my clients would not only trust, but also be good friends with. Yeah, it's really that simple, "you can trust me as I speak and sound like your friends."

4. Can you find someone who can help you?

Let's not pretend that this process is easy, it isn't! We need all the help we can get. Even for that Singaporean lady living in Australia, she is surrounded by Australians there - why aren't they helping her with her accent? Are they plain unhelpful? Well, the most obvious answer is that we're too polite to correct another person when they have an accent or make a mistake when they speak English. My friend said to me in the gym tonight, "The train delayed make me late". He wasn't a native speaker of English - but I understood him perfectly. Did I want to start giving him an English lesson there and then? Of course not. I'm not sure he was interested in getting an English lesson from me and more to the point, I didn't want to make him feel awkward or like he was being judged for the way he spoke English. Furthermore, I feared that others would be offended on his behalf if I had corrected his English, like "how dare you make him feel bad about his English!" The default response is not to correct someone when they make a mistake when they speak English and to only ask for clarification if you did not understand what they were trying to say. In terms of correcting someone's accent, you're really asking your friends to split hairs with you about how certain words are pronounced and to literally stop you mid-sentence just to point out when you had used a different vowel sound or placed the stress on the wrong syllable.

Let me give you an example: I used to pronounce the word 'Scotland' with quite a long first syllable, like 'Scaahtland'. I'm not sure where that came from, but I was told that Americans are far more likely to pronounce Scotland that way with an 'ah' vowel sound rather than a 'uh' vowel sound for the first syllable. Unnecessarily lengthening the first syllable made me sound remarkably non-native and quite American, I somehow picked up that habit along the way and no one corrected me as they knew exactly where I was referring to. Well, it is a mistake: short vowel sounds need to be short, that's how we differentiate words like been and bin, pull and pool, green and grin. Until it was pointed out to me, I didn't realize I was making that mistake. My partner was the one who told me to listen to the way he pronounce 'Scotland' and sure enough, he kept the first syllable really brief in comparison to the way I pronounced it. I now pronounce the word 'Scotland' the same way as he does after he corrected me. But I do ask him to correct me if I say something that makes me sound non-native, even if it makes me sound American. I guess when I am using 'Alex's voice' I might be so relaxed that I would revert back to saying 'Scaahtland' instead of 'Scotland' - but when I am in work mode, I am more keenly aware of not unnecessarily lengthening short vowel sounds. Thankfully my partner knows I won't take offence if he corrects me, but do you have friends who are both native speakers of the accent you wish to acquire and willing to help you out like that?

5. How far can you go with your abilities?

Well, that's a much broader question about learning anything when we are older! This is a question that I tend to encounter when discussing how we can learn a foreign language when we get older, whether it is easier to learn languages as a child. The bottom line is that many people think it is easier to learn new things when they are children: be it a sport, a musical instrument or a foreign language - but that's totally untrue. Children don't have the burden of having to do all the things that adults have to do - until the age of 18, most children and teenagers are full time students, so that's all they do all day, they dedicate all their time to learning and under those circumstances, of course it is easier to learn anything! Trying to learn anything new whilst holding down a full time job is extremely demanding of course, my friend Marianne at my adult gymnastics who is working full time and has two young daughters, so she misses quite a lot of training because she often just cannot find the time to come to gymnastics if something crops up at work or if she needs to do something for her children. She is also dependent on her husband being free to take care of her young children if she is going out for 3 hours. That's the main reason why she isn't making much progress - it has nothing to do with her attitude, talent or physical ability to do gymnastics, she just isn't finding the time to train regularly enough! Many adults with demanding jobs and family duties find themselves in the same situation as Marianne when it comes to learning anything new, but they often end up thinking, "oh my, it was far easier to learn new things when I was a child".

A lot of people would simply default to negativity, they think, "I can't change my accent, after al, I have grown up speaking like that, how can I ever change?" With that attitude, they give up before even trying. My response to that is simple: how much you can improve, how much you learn is entirely dependent on how much time and effort (but mostly time) you put into this. It is entirely up to you: learning more about a language you already speak is really no different from learning a new language - I speak several languages fluently but I am constantly trying to improve those that I already speak through more study and practice. Even if you are indeed monolingual, there's no reason to imagine that you're so fluent and perfect that you can never improve your mother tongue. Hardly anyone ever tries to improve a language they already speak - even if they were to try to study a language, they would try their hand at a new foreign language rather than improve their mother tongue or first language. But of course, with the right attitude and a willingness to invest a lot of time into changing one's accent, it is quite achievable. Heck, if one can master a foreign language as an adult, then it is far easier to simply modify the accent you have in a language that you already speak. When you learn a new language, you have to acquire a brand new set of vocabulary, figure out a new system of grammar (which can be very complicated and confusing) and get the pronunciation right when you speak - it's a huge project yet people regularly learn foreign languages anyway despite the very daunting challenges. So the bottom line is this: you reap what you sow.

A lot of how far you get depends on your discipline as well - it's easy to learn something but can you remember it? So in the example I had given of the way I had mispronounced the word 'Scotland', do I have the discipline to remember not to make that mistake again (of wrongly lengthening short vowel sounds) the next time I come across a word like "full" because if I wrongly lengthen that vowel sound, it will end up sounding more like "fool" which has a longer vowel sound. Let's compare this to a basic skill in gymnastics - the handstand. Coaches would often tell their gymnasts to keep their legs together when doing a handstand - with some gymnasts, you only need to tell them once and their legs would be glued together every time they do a handstand. However, there are others whom the coaches have to keep reminding time and time again, but even after months or even years of training, you still see them doing handstands with legs apart. To be fair, there are so many things to think about and be aware of when holding a handstand that you may end up separating your legs as you're focusing on something else altogether - the same way I may be thinking about the argument I am formulating and trying to construct a narrative during a conversation instead of focusing on how I pronounce each word that I am about to say. So, this does boil down to discipline and in terms of learning a sport ,a musical instrument or a language, the same principles apply: the more disciplined you are, the faster you will improve.

6. Can students do this? Should students do this?

Well, I certainly think so. Please allow me to be extremely clear here: I'm not talking about changing your accent because that's a fallacy to begin with. A competent speaker of English can switch between several different accents to suit the social situation - the same way a multilingual person can switch between several different languages depending on whom they are talking to. It is a complete fallacy to assume that we can only have one accent when we speak English - that may be true of some people who aren't very educated and struggle with English. Take my mother for instance, she speaks English with a very strong Singaporean accent and that's the only way she knows how to speak English. That's fine, I'm not judging her, she's pretty typical of older Singaporeans in the way she speaks English. But for younger people in Singapore who have access to a much higher quality of education these days, if they emerge from their formal education only speaking English as well as someone like my mother, then something is desperately wrong and they are being let down by the system. This begs the question: what is the purpose of education? Surely it is to prepare young students to face the many challenges awaiting them in the big bad working world. Hence we need to understand precisely the kind of challenges a young person like my nephew would need to face when he eventually has to find a job.

Yes my mother had a strong Singaporean accent but she got away with it as a primary school teacher back in the day - she taught at a primary school in Ang Mo Kio with a very local catchment area. Heck, virtually all her students lived in Ang Mo Kio, she didn't even have students coming from Yishun or Toa Payoh. So her very local accent was perfectly understood by her students who were all extremely local too, hence within that context, there really wasn't a problem with them having a strong local accent. However, a generation later, I am dealing with clients from all over the world and if I had the same accent as my parents, good grief, nobody would understand what the hell I am saying and I would really only be able to deal exclusively with Singaporean clients. So do you want to prepare the young people today to enter with world of international business with the right communication skills, or do you want to prepare them for very local jobs where they are only able to deal with people from a very small catchment area? Some may argue, oh perhaps not all the children will find themselves in a job where they need to deal with people from all over the world, so they really don't need to spend all this time and effort trying to learn different accents - whilst that may be the case, that same principle can be applied to every subject they do in school. "Oh not all children may end up in jobs where they need mathematics, so why bother with the subject? Let those who want to pursue accountancy and other jobs like that learn the requisite mathematics in their own free time." I work in finance and I don't need any maths skills - what the hell did I waste all that time and effort in school for, especially since I am now earning so much more than all my maths teachers ever did?

Some students may participate in some kind of amateur drama as part of their experience at school, this may be part of their curriculum or merely something they do for fun to develop a different aspect of their social skills. I had the opportunity to do that all through my education in Singapore which was pretty rare, I specifically chose to do theatre studies & drama (TSD) as an A level subject because it was something I had really enjoyed very much. So when you get on stage and have to act another character, one of the first things you do is think, okay how is this character going to sound like, what kind of accent would this character have? What kind of qualities am I trying to convey to the audience when I say these lines? Is this character someone who is confident or nervous? Eloquent or inarticulate? Sexy or geeky? A leader or a follower? A selfish person or a caring friend? Sure we can wear fancy costumes to make the character come to life, but so much of it depends on how we act on stage. The beauty about acting is that it forces you to think about how the audience is going to perceive the character you are portraying and thus what you need to do to convey those qualities. That is excellent training for real life when we have to interact with real people out there, we need to be always thinking about what kind of message we are giving them and within that context, one's accent is one of the key ways that shape the impressions we make on them. This doesn't have to be all hard work - it could be a lot of fun too.

So that's it from me on this topic: ultimately, you can have several different accents you can use for different situations, the same way you can learn several different languages. Let's not pretend that this is an easy process of course, but the same way you can learn how to play a new musical instrument, master a new sport or learn a new foreign language, with enough determination, dedication and discipline, you can most certainly master at least one other accent to a high enough standard, enough for you to use confidently at work. So what do you think about this issue? Have you tried to learn a different accent before - be it for work or even a school play? What have your experiences been like? How did you go about doing it and what were the challenges you faced? Leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.