Your Accent Is Not the Problem
By Sofia Navarro · Finding Your Voice
A version of this conversation happens regularly. Someone says they need to work on their accent, that it is why presentations do not land, that people ask them to repeat things.
Then they speak, and the accent is rarely the whole story. Usually something else is going on as well, and it is much more fixable.
Accent and understanding are different things
The clearest research on this comes from Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing. In a 1995 study, native English listeners heard short stretches of unscripted English from Mandarin speakers and did three things with each one: wrote down what they heard, rated how strong the accent was, and rated how easy it was to understand.1
The three measures came apart. Most of the speech was highly intelligible, written down accurately, and rated as easy to understand. Yet the accent ratings ranged widely, with a noticeable share of excerpts judged heavily accented. A strong accent and a clear message sat side by side again and again.
That is the finding in the title. Accent is how you sound. Intelligibility is whether people get the words. Comprehensibility is how much effort that takes. They are related, but you can change the second and third a great deal without touching the first.
What is usually happening instead
Rushing. Under pressure, many people speed up and, more importantly, stop pausing. The words run together and the listener gets no time to assemble them. The pauses matter more than the speed of the words themselves.
Volume trailing off. Uncertainty about pronunciation makes people quieter towards the end of sentences, exactly where the verb and the point often live. The listener gets the setup and loses the payload, and experiences that as "hard to understand."
Sentence length. Nested clauses are difficult to hold together in a second language while also standing in front of people. Long sentences collapse mid-way and get restarted, and the restarts read as difficulty.
Anxiety itself. Speaking a second language in public is its own kind of pressure. Peter MacIntyre and Robert Gardner found that anxiety about a second language interferes with processing at several stages, from taking information in to producing speech.2 Some of what feels like a language problem on stage is a nerves problem wearing a language costume.
Apologising for it. "Sorry, my English is not very good" primes the room to listen for errors instead of content. It is the most damaging sentence in the set, and it is entirely optional.
A correction on "just slow down"
A common piece of advice is to slow down by about a fifth. The research does not support it as a general rule.
Munro and Derwing tested it directly in 1998.3 They had high-proficiency Mandarin speakers read a passage, and native listeners rated the recordings. When speakers read deliberately slowly, listeners rated them as more accented and less comprehensible than at their normal rate. In a second experiment, a computer altered the speed of the recordings. Listeners preferred some of the speeded-up versions and none of the slowed-down ones. The authors concluded that a general strategy of slowing down may not help second-language speakers.
So the target is not slow. It is unhurried: your normal rate, with real pauses between ideas.
Five fixes
None of these require changing how you sound:
- Pause at full stops. A real pause, longer than a breath. It gives the listener assembly time, which matters more across an accent boundary, and it does the job people hope slowing down will do.
- Shorten sentences. One idea per sentence. Full stop. Next idea. Short sentences are easier to say and easier to hear, in every language.
- Hold volume to the end. Deliberately push the last three words of each sentence. Practise with a recording; the drop-off is usually invisible from the inside.
- Do not rush the opening. Nerves run highest at the start, and the room is still getting used to your voice. Give the first minute room.
- Delete the apology. Simply stop saying it.
Work through those five and much of the "accent problem" usually eases, because much of it was never the accent.
On the small residue that is pronunciation
Occasionally there is a real pronunciation issue, and it is often narrow: a handful of words, frequently domain-specific terms you learned by reading rather than hearing.
That is worth fixing, and it is a short word list rather than an identity project. Ask a colleague to flag the words they notice. There will be fewer than you fear.
What is rarely worth doing is trying to sound like a native speaker. It is an enormous investment, and it buys little. Audiences are not scoring your vowels. They are trying to follow your point.
The part that is not technique
Some of this is not about speech at all. There is a real anxiety underneath: that the accent marks you as an outsider, and the room will discount you.
That fear is not imaginary, and it would be dishonest to say so. Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar asked listeners to rate trivia statements read aloud by native and non-native speakers.4 The same statements were judged less likely to be true when read with a foreign accent, even though listeners were told the speakers were only reading lines written by someone else. The authors attributed this to the extra effort of processing accented speech being misread as doubt about the content.
Two practical points follow. First, anything that reduces the listener's effort helps: pauses, short sentences, a clear point stated early. Second, the bias is about the listener, not about you, and it is not a reason to stay quiet. People who speak, and speak clearly, give the room evidence that outweighs a first impression.
Put plainly, clarity, structure and the absence of apology change how you are received far more than phonetics do. Speak clearly, at your natural speed, with real pauses and without pre-emptive apology, and the accent becomes what it is: information about where you are from, and not much else.
References
- Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (1995). Foreign Accent, Comprehensibility, and Intelligibility in the Speech of Second Language Learners. Language Learning, 45(1), 73–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1995.tb00963.x
- MacIntyre, P. D., & Gardner, R. C. (1994). The subtle effects of language anxiety on cognitive processing in the second language. Language Learning, 44(2), 283–305. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1994.tb01103.x
- Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (1998). The Effects of Speaking Rate on Listener Evaluations of Native and Foreign‐Accented Speech. Language Learning, 48(2), 159–182. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9922.00038
- Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093–1096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025
Go deeper: The "140 Words a Minute" Number, and Why It’s the Wrong Target