An accent is a manner of pronunciation of a language. Everybody has an accent of their own. People don't realize they have accents because everybody around them talks like them. Then when somebody from outside your region come to visit, you notice the outsider's accent. Guess what, the outsider will notice your accent too. So when people say “She doesn't have an accent”, they mean “She doesn't have an accent from out of town”.
Before I came to the U.S., I knew that there's American, British, and Australian accent. Now I see that people around me talk very differently from those on TV. There are many different accents in the U.S. alone; Southern accents, Northeastern accents, other distinct regional accents and social group accents like, African American. However, there's one standard American accent that Americans see as “accent-less”. It's the Midwestern accent. It's the accent newscasters use. It's also the accent taught to people who are learning English as a second language. It is widely accepted through out the country.
It is really a matter of choice, in my opinion, what accent to adopt. When you are little you adopt accents very fast. By the time you are 20 years old, you may find it very hard or it even feels impossible to adopt an accent. But is it really impossible? I've heard many people say “We are Asians, our tongues are not like Westerners'. Here's my view on it. The tongue is a muscle. What is your favorite sport? Do you or someone you know play that sport better than other people who never play that sport. Why is that? One of the reason is because you train your skeletal muscles that coordinate your movements. You train your muscles so well that you don't even have to think when your muscles have to perform their duty which then will produce well-coordinated movements of your body, movements that other people can not even think of doing. The same principal applies to our tongue. We train our tongue the same way we train our skeletal muscles. Study reveals that accents are not fixed even in adulthood. They can change over time.
Again, it's a matter of choice whether or not to adopt an existing accent or to simply create your own “foreign” accent. And I have made my choice. For those of you who are interested in reducing your own “foreign” accent, dictionary.com is one great place for you to work on your accent. On top of that. I will also try to break down some words and hopefully you will notice particular sounds or emphasizes that you may not be aware before in English pronunciation. I hope my videos on accents will help. Good luck.
More videos will be available soon.
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