Speak Clear Blog

As The Lede points out in an article posted below, a number of the recently arrested Russian spies (or “illegals” as they say in русский) were able to persuade people in their community that their accents were derived from countries other than Russia. One woman sold herself as Dutch. Another spy turned the question around… “Where do you think I am from?”.

The question from a linguistic perspective is… To what extend are we able to mask our accents? How noticeable are they? And how much are we judged by these accents?

Research has shown that we tend to evaluate an accent on a socioeconomic basis, that is, based on class, status, wealth, etc.

What are your thoughts?

The Lede Article

Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications.  He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.

I am always telling my accent reduction clients to just throw themselves into speaking the language, no matter what their level of fluency is. It’s hard! I know. I’ve decided to take up Russian, and after listening to some cd’s, and practicing with some Russian friends of mine, I went to a Russian language meetup. But man was I shy! It’s not so easy to allow yourself to be an imperfect speaker when you are learning. Once I got over my hesitation, I learned more in one night than I did in five months of training merely by pretending, that’s right, playing the part of a Russian speaker. Sometimes you find more of your speaking potential by just pretending for a bit, imagining that you know more than you actually do. It gave me a little more confidence, and I was able to pick up more words as a result. So just throw yourself into the mix! I found that my Russian counterparts were more than willing to help once they saw I was trying. The readiness is all.

Jeffrey Davis is the owner of Speak Clear Communications. He is an executive public speaking coach and accent reduction coach in New York City.