CHAPTER 61

Accent—American or British?

Readers who are learning English may wonder if they should try to acquire an American accent or a

British accent. The answer is quite simple. Neither.
Today in England alone, there are over twenty regional accents that most Englishmen recognize and
many more local accents that are not so easy to define. Educated, middle-class Englishmen attempt to
speak standard, or BBC, English, but there is also the problem of class, a very important element in
English life. Members of the upper class define themselves by speaking in an exaggerated manner, while
the lower classes continue to use the regional accents. The end result is that the national language is badly
fragmented and no single region may be said to speak in a “typically English” accent.
The pattern is similar in North America, where there are numerous regional accents that everybody
recognizes and many less easily definable accents. Fortunately, North Americans do not have an upper-
class accent to complicate matters. Most educated, upper- and middle-class North Americans speak what
is called “middle American,” while the lower classes tend to emphasize their regional accents. But there
is no “typically American” accent.
The English have a saying, “If you hear somebody speaking perfectly correct English, they’re probably
not English.” Obviously, the student will not attempt to copy any of the regional accents, but one pitfall
that should be avoided is the affectation among the middle and upper class of turning many of the a sounds
into ah sounds.
The spelling rule is clear. “Unless it is modified by a silent e or other modifying vowels, the a is
almost always a short vowel, especially if it is followed by a doubled consonant. The a only sounds like
ah when followed by the letter r.” For example: bar, car, far, jar, star, etc. These have the ah sound, but
class, pass, ass, grass, glass, etc. do not.
This affectation is quite popular, and the student will hear a great number of words that have a short a
pronounced as if the a were a long vowel. For example: passport, banana, can’t, example, plant, fast,
glance, dance, chance. It becomes ludicrous when even the names of foreign countries are
mispronounced and Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan become Irahn, Pahkistahn, and Ahfgahnistahn.
The English-speaking population of North America is well over 300 million, while the combined
population of all the other English-speaking nations—Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South
Africa, the West Indies—is less then 100 million. North America is also the greatest exporter of movies
and TV shows and has the largest number of foreign students studying in its universities, so it is obvious
that the North American version of the English language is the dominant version. There are two major
pitfalls that the foreign student must avoid.
First, many North Americans have great difficulty pronouncing an internal t. Almost daily you will hear
innernet (internet), innernational (international), innerested (interested), budder (butter), bedder
(better), badder (batter), liddle (little), waiding (waiting), seddle (settle), gedding (getting), ledder
(letter), and many other poorly pronounced words. The student should carefully pronounce the internal t
whenever it is supposed to be pronounced.
Second, in a great many parts of North America the sound of the vowel o is changed to a. Hot becomes
hat, got becomes gat, and Colorado becomes Calarado. This is often, but not always, a regional accent,
and North Americans from New York to Toronto to Los Angeles can be heard mispronouncing the letter o
in this way. The student should always take care to pronounce this vowel correctly, bearing in mind that if
we hope for clear communication, enunciation is as important as pronunciation.