Is it possible to have no accent

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We identify each accent with only a sound or two. If both lose their most identifying traits, neither will particularly sound accented, but they won't sound the same either. But the good news is that no one will be able to tell. To reach members in the back of the audience, it is important to clearly enunciate each word. When each sound of the word is very clearly pronounced, it will fool a listener into thinking that the speaker is accent-less.

So, to blend in in a place far from home, apparently all you need to do is tone down certain vowels and enunciate your words. We get new words, there are grammatical changes, and accents change over time. If you listen to recordings made by people from your own language community years ago, you will hear for yourself that even over that time accents have changed. Try out some of the links from the Spoken Word Archive Group , for example. Human nature. In all sorts of ways, we behave like those we mix with.

We are members of social groups, and within our social group we like to behave in similar ways and show that we belong. We do this in language as well as in other ways e. When groups become distinct, the way they speak becomes distinct too.

This happens socially and geographically, but is easiest to illustrate by geographical differences. If a single group splits into two imagine that one half goes to Island A and one half to Island B , then once they have separated, their accents will change over time, but not in the same way, so that after just one generation the accent of Island A will be different from the accent of Island B.

If they stay completely separated for centuries, their dialects may become so different that we will start wanting to say they are speaking two different languages. Humans like to travel. Since humans left their place of origin in East Africa, more than , years ago, they have spread all over the world. And they have moved in waves in some places, mixing with, or conquering, people who were there earlier. One of the last places humans reached was New Zealand, which Polynesian people now known as 'Maoris' settled in the fourteenth century CE , joined by Europeans four hundred years later.

English developed in England as a result of people moving to England from across the North Sea in the fifth century CE -- they were at least the fourth major wave of humans to reach the island of Britain, and the descendants of the previous waves were still there when they arrived to mix with them. In modern times the last years the activities of aggressive and acquisitive Europeans has resulted in them moving all over the world and taking their languages especially English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French with them.

Separate development accounts for some accent variation. But sometimes we need to talk about the first generation of speakers of a particular language brought up in a new place. The first children to grow up in a new place are very important.

The children who grow up together are a 'peer group'. They want to speak the same as each other to express their group identity. The accent they develop as they go through their childhood will become the basis for the accents of the new place. So where does their accent come from? The first generation of children will draw on the accents of the adults around them, and will create something new. If people move to a new place in groups as English speakers did to America, Australia and New Zealand that group usually brings several different accents with them.

The children will draw on the mixture of accents they hear and create their own accent out of what they hear. The modern accents of Australia are more similar to London accents of English than to any other accent from England -- this is probably because the founder generation in the eighteenth century had a large component drawn from the poor of London, who were transported to Australia as convicts. The accents of New Zealand are similar to Australian accents because a large proportion of the early English-speaking settlers of New Zealand came from Australia.

The mix found in the speech of the settlers of a new place establishes the kind of accent that their children will develop.

But the first generation born in the new place will not keep the diversity of their parents' generation -- they will speak with similar accents to the others of their age group. And if the population grows slowly enough, the children will be able to absorb subsequent children into their group, so that even quite large migrations of other groups such as Irish people into Australia will not make much difference to the accent of the new place. Most parents know this. If someone from New York US marries someone from Glasgow Scotland, UK , and these two parents raise a child in Leeds England, UK , that child will not speak like either of the parents, but will speak like the children he I know of such a child!

To understand what happened in the past we need strong evidence from both language and history. We need to know about the places that migrants came from, and something about the kinds of accents they are likely to have had. Is there a Standard English accent? There is not a single correct accent of English. There is no neutral accent of English. All speakers of English need to cope with many different aspects and learn how to understand them.

Some accents are associated with social groups who have high prestige the kinds of accents spoken by highly educated people, for example , but there are also many of these high prestige accents, all of them regionally based. The accents that are traditionally taught to non-native speakers of English are high prestige accents from various places. The two most commonly taught accents in the world as a whole are both rather artificial: 'General American' more or less a Mid-Western and West Coast accent, and used by some high prestige speakers outside this region too ; and the British accent 'RP' which developed in the private boarding schools of the nineteenth century, and is associated with high prestige groups in England.

Both these accents are used over a wide geographical area, though in world terms both are regional accents General American is a US accent, and RP is an accent of England. They are heard more, by more people in the country, than are accents which are associated with a smaller area: so people are familiar with them. These accents are the ones transcribed in dictionaries. Because they are used over wide areas, and used by people of high social class, they are seen as being suitable to teach to foreign learners of English.

For this reason, they are called 'reference varieties'. When radio was developed in the early twentieth century, many radio stations in the US and the UK selected their continuity presenters and news readers by their accent.

The BBC, incidentally, no longer has this policy and now uses news readers and presenters with a wider range of accents. In all languages some accents have higher prestige than others.

Tests of judgment have been made in many languages which show that people within a community often share judgments. In the UK, for example, the accent associated with the city of Birmingham consistently comes out as being 'ugliest' while London accents tend to be heard as 'criminal'.

These judgments are based on stereotypical associations. If British accents are played to Americans, they do not make the same judgments, because they have not learnt to associate different British accents with the same stereotypes British people have.

In the US many speakers are prejudiced against 'Southern' accents, but British people would not judge Southern accents badly in the same way. When you learn a second language, you may have difficulty with sounds that don't occur in your native language; for example, some languages have trilled r 's, 'clicks' made with the tongue as air is taken in, or sounds made much farther back in the throat than English sounds.

Surprisingly, though, the hardest sounds to learn may be those that are similar to, but just a bit different from, sounds in your native language. It seems to be very difficult to overcome the tendency to keep using the familiar sounds from your native language. In this sense, your native language causes 'interference' in your efforts to pick up the new language.

Again, it depends on whether we're talking about a first or second language. Children acquire their native language effortlessly, regardless of the language. Learning another language later on, however, is a different matter. Some languages do have far more complicated word-building rules than others, and others have far more complex sound patterns or sentence structures. But despite differences in individual areas of a language, researchers have not found any one language or group of languages to be clearly more difficult or complicated in all areas.

To some extent, how difficult it is to learn a language depends on how much it has in common with the language or languages that you already speak. Learning a language that is closely related to your native language can be easier than learning one that is very different. French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are all descended from Latin, so they are closely related, and a speaker of one can learn any of the others fairly easily. Likewise, English, Dutch, and German are closely related, having all descended from an earlier language called Germanic, so it would be relatively easy for an English speaker to learn Dutch or German.

But learning a language that's closely related to your native language can also bring problems, because their similarity can result in interference from your native language that would cause you to make mistakes. A very different language such as Chinese, Turkish, or Mohawk, however, brings additional difficulties. In Chinese, for example, a 'word' is made up not just of consonants and vowels, but also the 'tone', or pitch, with which it is uttered.

This means that the syllable ma uttered with a high tone 'mother' in Mandarin Chinese is a completely different word from ma uttered with a low rising tone 'hemp' , which in turn is a completely different word from ma uttered with a high falling tone 'scold'. The words of such a language are likely to be very difficult for a native English speaker to master.

In short, no one language or group of languages can be said to be harder than the rest. All languages are easy for infants to learn; it's only those of us who grew up speaking something else that find them difficult.

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