Reducing accent could boost job chances

If there’s one thing that wearing masks has revealed, it’s the separation between those of us who enunciate and those who mumble. The mumblers were already destined to repeat themselves, but when wearing masks, their fate is sealed. They should just make room in their schedule to say everything twice, because the mask covers any clues that listeners might have used to “hear” what they’re saying.

Or, as an alternate solution, the mumblers could just learn to speak more clearly. As a mumbler myself, I’m beginning to see the value in this remedy.

While we’re on the subject, here’s the real topic of today’s column: people who speak English with an accent. While accents are generally charming, there’s a tipping point at which they impede communication. If you speak with an accent and also mumble, you’re probably already repeating yourself a lot – adding a mask to the mix can only make things worse.

This is more than a social issue, as communication is the primary tool of the workplace and the essential element in getting hired. If you can’t be understood, you will always have trouble getting jobs, doing your work, or being promoted. And heaven forbid if your work involves engineering or medicine or any discipline where you need to describe complex issues using specialized vocabulary. Even while conducting your duties well, you may be treated with less credibility because of your accent, or kept from speaking at meetings because others don’t understand you well.

Of all the things an individual might do to improve their professional prospects, few will have as much impact as speaking more clearly. I’m not an expert on reducing accents, but over the years I’ve gained a certain amount of expertise on the problem itself. My understanding comes from 15 years of hosting students living in the United States while they improve their language skills.

After countless nonsensical dinnertime conversations, my husband and I have developed a few rules that seem true to us. Here they are, in reverse order of importance:

5) Being told back home that you don’t have an accent doesn’t mean it’s true.

4) Speaking more quietly doesn’t reduce the accent.

3) Speaking faster really doesn’t help.

2) Saying we don’t listen doesn’t mean you’re speaking clearly.

1) In the English language, consonants are not optional.

This last point, which I consider to be the No. 1 rule, seems to apply to English language learners from just about any national origin. We’ve noticed the problem with native Spanish speakers, Japanese students, Russians, and everyone in between. Somehow the impulse to swallow all the hard sounds of each word seems to overcome our students, and our conversations begin to sound like humming.

For our students, the situation isn’t critical. They’ll go home with their skills vastly improved and other non-native English speakers may never notice that something is amiss. But anyone intending to live, work or study in the United States for a prolonged period, or to make this their permanent home, owes it to themselves to improve their prospects for success and happiness by being more easily understood.

My No. 1 tip for accent reduction is to employ the services of a coach. A cursory search online will bring you dozens of options, ranging in price from $25 to $85 per lesson. While ongoing coaching would likely be the most quickly productive, even a few lessons could give you a baseline set of exercises to practice every day. Other tips that I’ve read about or learned from our students include: Read aloud from books; repeat sentences while listening to e-books; repeat problem words over and over using clear pronunciation; imitate the mouth movements of native speakers; focus on saying the last sound of each word; record yourself regularly to check your progress; slow down your speech; ask a friend or colleague to correct you.

To these I would add: Don’t be prideful. The longer you have lived and worked in the United States, the more certain you might be that your accent falls in the charming category and not the “Say what?” classification. But are you sure? It won’t hurt to get an analysis.

Just don’t worry about eliminating your accent altogether. For one thing, that may not be possible. But it would also be a loss to the rest of us, who need to be reminded how big the world is. Especially these days, when we can’t travel, just hearing an extra lilt or a different rhythm in someone’s speech is enough to lift my spirits. So keep talking through that mask – but do me a favor and enunciate a bit more, please. I promise to do the same.