72. Mark Your Accent
Eliza Doolittle Is a Myth
The inexorable march of globalization in business has created a vast landscape of diverse workforces of diverse origins, all working together but speaking in a Babel of tongues. In their desire to communicate effectively, transplanted workers seek to learn the language of their adopted homes in classes and books, from CDs, computers, and online programs. These expatriates also seek to speak their newly acquired language more clearly, which has created a surge in a veteran niche industry called “Accent Reduction.”
An Internet search of that term yields more than a million entries posted by scores of present-day versions of Henry Higgins offering their services to multiple variations of Eliza Doolittle to help them to become not only fair ladies and gentlemen, but to pronounce their words free of native accents that can mask their meanings.
Remember, however, that the source for My Fair Lady was George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and that the source for Pygmalion was mythology. In that legendary tale, Pygmalion, a Roman sculptor, worked for years to carve a stone statue of his ideal woman. Pygmalion became so enamored of the statue he named Galatea, that he prayed for the Gods bring her to life and, magically, they did.
The operative word in myths is “magically.” The operative word in reality is, to quote Eliza Doolittle, “not bloody likely.” “Reduction” is a more attainable goal than the elimination that Eliza achieved, but elimination is nearly impossible in the nonfiction world for one simple reason: Speaking is a habit practiced since infancy, and habits of that duration are extremely difficult to break.
Does that leave those of you who are striving to adapt to your new environment hopelessly stuck at Square One, resigned to pronounce your English words marked, if not obscured by your native accent? Not quite, but the hard, cold fact of a deeply imbedded—and therefore subconscious—speech pattern means that you must set realistic goals and choose the best path to achieve them. To help you find your path, let me share with you how I learned to speak Spanish.
Spanish Lessons
My first acquaintance with the native tongue of Miguel Cervantes was in the New York City public school system where, like most other U.S. school systems, the approach to language lessons is to drill students with copious lists of the days of the week, months of the year, cardinal and ordinal numbers, common nouns, and verb conjugations. My second experience, in a Spanish course in college, was the same.
By the time I was ready to fly solo in public, my brain went into calisthenics mode: Every time I searched for a Spanish word, my mind went through a prescribed step drill of the entire list of nouns and the conjugations of each verb. What came tumbling out of my mouth was more spastic than Spanish.
This inefficient system continued to haunt and embarrass me into adult life. Every time I tried to speak Spanish—on vacations in the Caribbean, in restaurants and commerce with Hispanic workers in New York, and in a brief professional foray in Spain—I felt as if was stumbling down a long flight of stairs. But then in 1983, I had a long professional foray that radically changed the system.
In what was to be my last job in television before founding Power Presentations, I was hired to produce a drama series for Televisa, the Mexican media conglomerate. I moved, lock, stock and barrel, to Mexico City to fulfill a year-long contract. Because the series was to be produced in English, the position did not require me to speak Spanish, but it did require me to communicate with people who spoke no English.
For that entire year, I had to speak Spanish in order to eat, drink, shop, and travel. Before I knew it, the step drill in my mind had vanished. Within three months, I became fluent enough to speak Spanish in production conferences with my Mexican colleagues and in script conferences with an Argentine writer named Norberto Vieyra, who spoke no English.
The only impediment to our story discussions was accent. Argentine Spanish is pronounced very differently from Mexican Spanish, and Norberto’s accent was as difficult for me, as mine—in Spanish—was for him. My newfound fluency in verbiage had been accompanied by a fluency in accent. Norberto had difficulty understanding me because I sounded Mexican!
Whither the fluency? I had taken no lessons, read no books, listened to no tapes. But I had listened to Spanish: on television and radio, in the Televisa offices, on the streets, and in the shops and restaurants of Mexico City.
Ears Versus Eyes
The operative word in learning languages, therefore, is “listen.” I finally learned to speak Spanish by hearing it spoken and then speaking it myself. All it took for me to learn was to listen to new words and then to repeat them. If that process sounds familiar, it should, for it is just how all human beings learn to speak all languages—as children. Children listen to their parents and then speak. Period. No books, no lists, no memorization, no conjugation, no thinking. The brain and the eyes are not involved in the process, only the ears and the mouth.
Listen and speak. Hear the words and imitate the sounds. The accent comes with the territory.
Berlitz, the venerable international language school has long offered a program called Total Immersion, which involves organized travel to a destination where the desired language is spoken; to Mexico for Spanish or to France for French. Once there, the students, shepherded by Berlitz instructors, spend one to three weeks living as a native, speaking only the target language. My Mexican experience was, in its own way, total immersion—without the supervised instruction.
If you want to reduce your accent, develop your own form of immersion. Listen to English on radio and television or to podcasts on the Internet. Hear the words and imitate the sounds. Open your mind and your ears to the English you encounter in your daily life and repeat what you hear. Before long, your English will sound more like that of a native rather than filtered through the pronunciation pattern of your original language. Your accent will never vanish, but you will sound clearer.
Repetition plus imitation equals Verbalization, the rehearsal technique you read about in Chapter 46, “Eight Presentations a Day.” Verbalization is one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve the fluidity of your presentation; you can also use it to improve the clarity of your speech—and become a fair lady or gentleman.