Accent reduction

Aaaaaaaaand I’m back!

This blog post is quite interesting to me. I’ve only found out about this subject recently when I was looking up actors for one of my other posts. 

I never really knew what an accent reduction was. However, now I’ve learned that accent reduction is a way of modifying your own accent into a new accent so the old one is erased.

The best way to reduce your accent is by training. Whether it’s with an accent coach or by constantly mimicking the accent you want, the more you train your brain to get used to talking with a new accent, the easier it will come out without having to think about it.

Apart from Portia de Rossi, who I’ve mentioned in a previous post, another actress that is an example of accent reduction is Charlize Theron (Snowhite and the Huntsman). Charlize Theron is a South African actress but once I’ve looked up some of her interviews to hear her South African accent, I’ve noticed that she just has a regular American accent. In an interview, she mentioned that she spoke more Afrikaans, which is the South African language, back at home so she had a horrible accent since she didn’t know much English. It was when she moved to the United States as a model at sixteen that she learned to speak English properly, hence the American accent.

Accent reduction is most commonly used for people that move into an entirely different country or city so they try to adapt the native’s accent to sound more “normal” to the people around them. You could take accent reduction classes almost anywhere now. Did you know that even the University of Windsor offers accent reduction classes? Pretty cool, eh?!



P.S. Doesn’t Mme Mantysaari kind of look like Charlize Theron?


Sources:
http://www.thesouthafrican.com/entertainment/an-evening-with-charlize.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_reduction