Pardon the Way I Speak

Everyone has an accent, even if it is a "flat" accent taken from what we call Received Pronunciation or General/Standard English. We speak the way we were brought up to speak but we also learn to speak in the way people want us to speak.

Actors may have to learn several accents. People who do promotional announcements and movie voiceovers often practice that flat accent English that is clearly and precisely enunciated. It would grate on you in a normal conversation (unless maybe you were talking with Morgan Freeman or Roscoe Lee Browne).

We learn to speak in a comfortable pattern that our families and friends share. We learn to use the same phrases, the same words, and the same funky accents. We don't ask anyone for permission to speak the way we do. We just do it.

You can get all sorts of funky ideas off the Internet but at the end of the day you are who you are and no one can change that except you. If you study and practice you may develop a sweet, sophisticated accent. Or you may come off like a broken hillbilly.

People spend a lot of time studying non-standard English dialects and accents. There are so many there is some debate about "what is standard English" and what is not.

There is even a special dialect called Basic English or Simple English that has been constructed to help people master the most important parts of the language.

Basic English uses only 850 root words and a small set of modifiers (called affixes and suffixes). Anyone who grows up speaking a normal English dialect can understand Basic English. But Basic English also allows the speaker to use 100 words for any field or profession and another 50 words for any special niche within that field or profession.

Basic English is really used to teach grammar and vocabulary and it does not have an accent, but if you were to meet someone who only spoke in Basic English you would probably sense something odd about their speech.

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