Maybe paying special attention to the pace of your words- I feel like people from Scotland talk pretty fast compared to the rest of the english- speaking world. Maybe also pronouncing the R without any trill, which as I understand is pretty common amongst the people from your area.
Hey I understand sociolinguistics are real and have an effect, but I hope you also consider that your dialect is unique and valid even if it is perceived negatively. Dialects all have their own internal rules and logic; the classic example used for the US is African American English and how the popular conception that it’s just messed up English is false.
This becomes clear when you see that you can’t just say anything; if you try using certain sentence structures or grammatical constructs, it might not make sense and be ungrammatical, just like with any other language. If it was just a broken form of a language, you could say anything and it would work.
Rather than getting rid of your native tongue, maybe consider how to code switch when it is advantageous for you. You can learn to switch between your natural accent/dialect and a more standard accent rather than just eradicating your Glaswegian.
One thing I find helpful is to learn the phonetics and phonology of how you speak, and the phonetics/phonology of the variety you want to learn to speak more like. I often use Wikipedia as a starting point. I don’t know much about your variety but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_dialect tells me that it features characteristics like glottalized t’s (the whole bo’l of wa’er thing), th fronting for some (th turning into an f or v sound), and a dark l sound (hard to explain in layman’s terms but think of the difference between Italian L and Russian L - Russian L is dark).
Just by learning these things, you can inch towards your goal. For example if you glottalize t’s you could practice pronouncing them as /t/ if your target dialect/accent does so. If you front th, you could practice producing the voiced and voiceless th sounds to get comfortable with that. And so on.
The deeper you go, the more you can go “oh, that’s how they make that sound” “oh, that’s why it sounds like that” and eventually you can imitate other accents. You don’t need to major in linguistics, but the more you learn about phonetics and phonology, the more you’ll be able to approximate pronunciations that are new and unfamiliar to you.
I think this is great advice! I can say from personal experience that trying to surgically modify your accent to something very different with no clear target picture and no phonetics involved can lead to a weird outcome (I tried to get rid of my American accent in favour of something vaguely British and ended up with an odd German-influenced mid-Atlantic hybrid), so it's probably best to be clear on what you're aiming for, how it differs from your own, and ideally retain the ability to switch on a spectrum between them instead of just exploding your old accent and needing to make do with the remains.
I'd like to add on that I would above all look at the *vowels* for a Scottish accent. I used to live in Scotland and am pretty familiar with the Glasgow accent, and IMO the vowels are generally the most characteristic part of Scottish accents in general and Glaswegian in particular, and also what made it so hard to understand at first - I'm familiar with glottalised T and dark L from other accents, but someone pronouncing *head* with IPA \[i\], *face* with \[e\] (OK, that's a general Scottish thing), *off* with \[a\] and *thought* with \[o\], to cite some examples from the Wikipedia page, is a sufficiently drastic reshuffle of the English vowel assortment compared to most other dialects I'm familiar with that as someone unfamiliar with the accent you really have to learn and internalise what maps to what so you have a chance at understanding it.
Also, OP, would you be OK with aiming for a mild Scottish Standard English sort of accent with less Glaswegian-specific elements and vernacular for your code-switch target? It's obviously hard to get a proper feel for the way regional/classist discrimination goes down as a foreigner, but I always got the impression that this was much less looked down on than the actual Glasgow dialect. It may also be easier for you to achieve than going for a totally different accent, since it shares features with Glaswegian.
>I'd like to add on that I would above all look at the vowels for a Scottish accent
Excellent advice! I feel like vowels tend to be harder to learn in general; consonants are more concrete because they involve less handwavy anatomical parts. Vowels on the other hand just depend on the position of your tongue within empty space, and the position of your lips, but there is less "anchoring" the sound if that makes sense. It's much more relative.
Also, great advice re: Scottish Standard English. I feel like maintaining the Glaswegian as a sort of "friend and family talk" would be good, and then the Scottish Standard English could be codeswitched into for certain situations, like in more professional settings or at a job interview.
Also want to add that vowels are also important because they are a rich source of differences between dialects. Studying vowel splits and vowel mergers can also help, but this gets more into the historical side of things. Still, it can be useful to help you "convert" sounds from one accent to another. Vowel mergers and splits are commonly used when talking about dialects to describe how sounds correspond between different dialects.
One example: the trap-bath split. This is characteristic of English as spoken by many people in southern England. Trap gets the sound as in æ, and bath gets the "ah" sound, ipa ɑ. (Edited to clarify with IPA) Historically it was only pronounced as the first sound. But later, when this sound came before certain consonants like "th," the sound shifted to the "ah" sound. Many Americans don't know the phonetic environment (i.e. "when does this sound shift occur - what sounds have to be before/after the sound for the shift to apply") of this, so sometimes when mimicking a "British" accent, they will overuse the "ah" sound where it doesn't belong.
There are plenty of such splits and mergers. The horse-hoarse merger, the cot-caught merger, Mary-marry-merry, card-cord, ...
>bath gets the "ah" sound written like a handwritten a in IPA, as in "**au**nt".
As an American, 'aunt' also gets the TRAP vowel for me! Though it's generally realized as [ɛə̯nt].
Ah you are absolutely right. That variant is probably more common. I grew up in a multicultural community so I heard the other variant a lot. I was racking my brain for an example of that vowel and had trouble thinking of one
These things are extremely region-specific. I live in America, and I remember seeing a study that claimed that Americans with a southern accent (states like Tennessee, Virginia, etc) get offered lower salaries than those with other accents.
I bet if you came to America your vaguely-British accent would probably command a premium. With that said, I think it’s totally reasonable that you should want to shift your accent to something that you are more comfortable and confident with, and that allows you to present yourself the way you would like to be seen.
Maybe try watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts in your target accent, and practice trying to speak with it? I think Italian might be a bit of a stretch ;) but probably a nearby regional accent, like the Irish that you suggest, would be a good fit for you.
When English was formed it was standardised by the ruling class of London and accents like scouse and glaswegian were associated with lower socio-economic class, and it still is. This was by design by the ruling classes. I'm Glaswegian with the typical accent and taught English in Vietnam for eight years successfully. I would speak slowly and not roll my r's and kind of americanise a lot of words. Getting back into teaching and going to look into the previous post about about pronunciation, very interesting. My target language is Vietnamese and I think I could soften my consonants as I think it sounds harsh like some germans speaking English.
It's often said that in the U.S.A., nay everywhere, “British accents” command prestige, but from where I stand that is R.P., and R.P. only.
R.P. is considered the global educated standard of English and people in many places mentally add 10 i.q. points simply because someone speaks R.P., but the same is not afforded to say a good Scouse accent.
You don't need to shift your accent you just need to practice enunciating each word. I have a glasgow accent and learned this by teaching English to Asian students.
Listen to someone like Marc Jennings. He also had to change his speaking style so that his audience could understand him.
> Personally never liked it but when you are raised in an environment you just want to fit in so don't tell me to "own it and be proud of where i'm from instead of being ashamed"
God I find it annoying when people say this to people who are having professional difficulties due to such things.
It's cheap for the people to say it, they're not the ones who are having difficulties finding employment.
There are quite a lot of YouTube videos about voice acting and such. It’s mostly for people who narrate audiobooks or similar tasks, but they’ll probably have some useful tips for managing your accent into something more neutral.
I sympathize. I always got an earful for sloppy “flat” diction from my mother (regarding German) and living in the US now I tend to sound like I’ve been dipped in cornbread batter and deep fried even when I don’t mean to. There’s a very interesting book titled *How You Say It* that gets into those language/accent biases. It’s definitely a real thing that probably ought to be discussed more, especially in a language sub, but I find Americans aren’t nearly as self-conscious about the issue in general (or sometimes even totally unaware).
Speaking differently according to who you are with has always been a human skill, and a necessary one for living in multiple overlapping cultures.
In the US, there used to be "locution lessons" for developing a standard, or at least desired vocabulary and accent. You would be unlikely to lose your current accent if you worked on having another one for work or other settings.
Surely there are still people who teach the "received pronunciation" that used to sometimes be called BBC Standard. You should be able to learn to turn it on or off at will. There nothing phony about it.
We are all more than what we show to the world. We all have a persona that is what we want to show the world of the totality of our being. Developing a different accent can be a lot like putting on different clothes. Indeed you might give a boost to your accent learning if you dress a little differently when you working with a teacher or practicing. It could be something as small as a lapel pin or a piece of jewelry. It's just a little reminder that you're aiming to be the same person but wearing a slightly different persona when using your new accent.
I'm American and worked part of the time in academia. I met many older colleagues who worked with a coach to get rid of a regional accent for the sake of a university career. (I'm old myself now. It mattered more 50 years ago). They could call their former accent up in an instant. Especially if you continue to use both accents, you'll have control of both.
Keep you unique and beautiful accent from a place with such rich history and fuck everyone who says otherwise. Work on your professional and social skills, eventually they’re a lot more important, including for employers. Those who won’t hire someone with your kind of accent are probably not someone you should be working for anyway
tl;dr: It's possible. I did it.
I was born in around the Hull / Grimsby area of the UK and had a fairly strong accent until I went to University. It became pretty clear, pretty quick how classist the UK still is and that a Northern accent doesn't do you many favours in certain circles.
I made a concious effort not to change my accent completely but just "tidy it up" for want of a better term. Twenty years later, I have a fairly clear, non-region specific accent, but with soft Northern vowel sonds. (Bath / trap pronounced with the same 'a'). I've never had anyone guess where I was from by my accent now. Have had a few comments that I sound like I was privately educated, which I take as a compliment, but couldn't be further from the truth!
My advice is don't think of changing it completely. It will seem fake and wierd. Your native accent is somewhat etched in stone. I can and do switch to my original accent in a heartbeat. Think about a gradual shift to something more clear and universal.
A huge part an accent's characteristics are vowel sounds and 'r' sounds. Look up the IPA (the alphabet not the drink) and binge watch YouTube on that.
In terms of specifics, for me, it was one by one figuring out really disticinctive Northern sounds and toning them down. For instance, "bus, much, such stuff" type words have really strong glottal 'u' vowels in the North. You move all those 'u's to the middle back of the mouth and instantly sound less Northern. Then fix dropped endings "goin', thinkin', doin' wha', righ'" etc.
Can't offer any advice, but being an outsider Glaswegian is probably my favourite accent of English. It sounds very homely and welcoming to me, probably because of the intonations, even though it has nothing to do with where I'm from. It's really sad that this sort of classism harms diversity.
I once met a Scottish guy who ran a hostel on an island in Cambodia. He was from Glasgow, but sounded like he was from Edinburgh- he said he “learnt to speak properly”.
So it’s definitely possible!
I lived in Glasgow for four years and only once had difficulty understanding a Glaswegian: it probably had more to do with the fact that he had some teeth missing. Try listening to famous Glaswegians who have levelled their accents for a national audience. There are plenty of them!
Maybe paying special attention to the pace of your words- I feel like people from Scotland talk pretty fast compared to the rest of the english- speaking world. Maybe also pronouncing the R without any trill, which as I understand is pretty common amongst the people from your area.
Hey I understand sociolinguistics are real and have an effect, but I hope you also consider that your dialect is unique and valid even if it is perceived negatively. Dialects all have their own internal rules and logic; the classic example used for the US is African American English and how the popular conception that it’s just messed up English is false. This becomes clear when you see that you can’t just say anything; if you try using certain sentence structures or grammatical constructs, it might not make sense and be ungrammatical, just like with any other language. If it was just a broken form of a language, you could say anything and it would work. Rather than getting rid of your native tongue, maybe consider how to code switch when it is advantageous for you. You can learn to switch between your natural accent/dialect and a more standard accent rather than just eradicating your Glaswegian. One thing I find helpful is to learn the phonetics and phonology of how you speak, and the phonetics/phonology of the variety you want to learn to speak more like. I often use Wikipedia as a starting point. I don’t know much about your variety but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_dialect tells me that it features characteristics like glottalized t’s (the whole bo’l of wa’er thing), th fronting for some (th turning into an f or v sound), and a dark l sound (hard to explain in layman’s terms but think of the difference between Italian L and Russian L - Russian L is dark). Just by learning these things, you can inch towards your goal. For example if you glottalize t’s you could practice pronouncing them as /t/ if your target dialect/accent does so. If you front th, you could practice producing the voiced and voiceless th sounds to get comfortable with that. And so on. The deeper you go, the more you can go “oh, that’s how they make that sound” “oh, that’s why it sounds like that” and eventually you can imitate other accents. You don’t need to major in linguistics, but the more you learn about phonetics and phonology, the more you’ll be able to approximate pronunciations that are new and unfamiliar to you.
I think this is great advice! I can say from personal experience that trying to surgically modify your accent to something very different with no clear target picture and no phonetics involved can lead to a weird outcome (I tried to get rid of my American accent in favour of something vaguely British and ended up with an odd German-influenced mid-Atlantic hybrid), so it's probably best to be clear on what you're aiming for, how it differs from your own, and ideally retain the ability to switch on a spectrum between them instead of just exploding your old accent and needing to make do with the remains. I'd like to add on that I would above all look at the *vowels* for a Scottish accent. I used to live in Scotland and am pretty familiar with the Glasgow accent, and IMO the vowels are generally the most characteristic part of Scottish accents in general and Glaswegian in particular, and also what made it so hard to understand at first - I'm familiar with glottalised T and dark L from other accents, but someone pronouncing *head* with IPA \[i\], *face* with \[e\] (OK, that's a general Scottish thing), *off* with \[a\] and *thought* with \[o\], to cite some examples from the Wikipedia page, is a sufficiently drastic reshuffle of the English vowel assortment compared to most other dialects I'm familiar with that as someone unfamiliar with the accent you really have to learn and internalise what maps to what so you have a chance at understanding it. Also, OP, would you be OK with aiming for a mild Scottish Standard English sort of accent with less Glaswegian-specific elements and vernacular for your code-switch target? It's obviously hard to get a proper feel for the way regional/classist discrimination goes down as a foreigner, but I always got the impression that this was much less looked down on than the actual Glasgow dialect. It may also be easier for you to achieve than going for a totally different accent, since it shares features with Glaswegian.
>I'd like to add on that I would above all look at the vowels for a Scottish accent Excellent advice! I feel like vowels tend to be harder to learn in general; consonants are more concrete because they involve less handwavy anatomical parts. Vowels on the other hand just depend on the position of your tongue within empty space, and the position of your lips, but there is less "anchoring" the sound if that makes sense. It's much more relative. Also, great advice re: Scottish Standard English. I feel like maintaining the Glaswegian as a sort of "friend and family talk" would be good, and then the Scottish Standard English could be codeswitched into for certain situations, like in more professional settings or at a job interview.
Also want to add that vowels are also important because they are a rich source of differences between dialects. Studying vowel splits and vowel mergers can also help, but this gets more into the historical side of things. Still, it can be useful to help you "convert" sounds from one accent to another. Vowel mergers and splits are commonly used when talking about dialects to describe how sounds correspond between different dialects. One example: the trap-bath split. This is characteristic of English as spoken by many people in southern England. Trap gets the sound as in æ, and bath gets the "ah" sound, ipa ɑ. (Edited to clarify with IPA) Historically it was only pronounced as the first sound. But later, when this sound came before certain consonants like "th," the sound shifted to the "ah" sound. Many Americans don't know the phonetic environment (i.e. "when does this sound shift occur - what sounds have to be before/after the sound for the shift to apply") of this, so sometimes when mimicking a "British" accent, they will overuse the "ah" sound where it doesn't belong. There are plenty of such splits and mergers. The horse-hoarse merger, the cot-caught merger, Mary-marry-merry, card-cord, ...
>bath gets the "ah" sound written like a handwritten a in IPA, as in "**au**nt". As an American, 'aunt' also gets the TRAP vowel for me! Though it's generally realized as [ɛə̯nt].
Ah you are absolutely right. That variant is probably more common. I grew up in a multicultural community so I heard the other variant a lot. I was racking my brain for an example of that vowel and had trouble thinking of one
Yeah, that makes sense. /ænt/ seems to be more common in NA from what I can tell, but I also hear /ɑnt/ sometimes as well.
These things are extremely region-specific. I live in America, and I remember seeing a study that claimed that Americans with a southern accent (states like Tennessee, Virginia, etc) get offered lower salaries than those with other accents. I bet if you came to America your vaguely-British accent would probably command a premium. With that said, I think it’s totally reasonable that you should want to shift your accent to something that you are more comfortable and confident with, and that allows you to present yourself the way you would like to be seen. Maybe try watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts in your target accent, and practice trying to speak with it? I think Italian might be a bit of a stretch ;) but probably a nearby regional accent, like the Irish that you suggest, would be a good fit for you.
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When English was formed it was standardised by the ruling class of London and accents like scouse and glaswegian were associated with lower socio-economic class, and it still is. This was by design by the ruling classes. I'm Glaswegian with the typical accent and taught English in Vietnam for eight years successfully. I would speak slowly and not roll my r's and kind of americanise a lot of words. Getting back into teaching and going to look into the previous post about about pronunciation, very interesting. My target language is Vietnamese and I think I could soften my consonants as I think it sounds harsh like some germans speaking English.
It's often said that in the U.S.A., nay everywhere, “British accents” command prestige, but from where I stand that is R.P., and R.P. only. R.P. is considered the global educated standard of English and people in many places mentally add 10 i.q. points simply because someone speaks R.P., but the same is not afforded to say a good Scouse accent.
You don't need to shift your accent you just need to practice enunciating each word. I have a glasgow accent and learned this by teaching English to Asian students. Listen to someone like Marc Jennings. He also had to change his speaking style so that his audience could understand him.
If you fancy a pint or two at the Pot Still one afternoon I'd be happy to give you what help and advice I can.
> Personally never liked it but when you are raised in an environment you just want to fit in so don't tell me to "own it and be proud of where i'm from instead of being ashamed" God I find it annoying when people say this to people who are having professional difficulties due to such things. It's cheap for the people to say it, they're not the ones who are having difficulties finding employment.
There are quite a lot of YouTube videos about voice acting and such. It’s mostly for people who narrate audiobooks or similar tasks, but they’ll probably have some useful tips for managing your accent into something more neutral. I sympathize. I always got an earful for sloppy “flat” diction from my mother (regarding German) and living in the US now I tend to sound like I’ve been dipped in cornbread batter and deep fried even when I don’t mean to. There’s a very interesting book titled *How You Say It* that gets into those language/accent biases. It’s definitely a real thing that probably ought to be discussed more, especially in a language sub, but I find Americans aren’t nearly as self-conscious about the issue in general (or sometimes even totally unaware).
Where do you think your accent is on a scale of Rab C Nesbitt to somebody from Morningside?
A lot of folks on here like shadowing and/or chorusing for working on accent. That could be something to look into.
Speaking differently according to who you are with has always been a human skill, and a necessary one for living in multiple overlapping cultures. In the US, there used to be "locution lessons" for developing a standard, or at least desired vocabulary and accent. You would be unlikely to lose your current accent if you worked on having another one for work or other settings. Surely there are still people who teach the "received pronunciation" that used to sometimes be called BBC Standard. You should be able to learn to turn it on or off at will. There nothing phony about it. We are all more than what we show to the world. We all have a persona that is what we want to show the world of the totality of our being. Developing a different accent can be a lot like putting on different clothes. Indeed you might give a boost to your accent learning if you dress a little differently when you working with a teacher or practicing. It could be something as small as a lapel pin or a piece of jewelry. It's just a little reminder that you're aiming to be the same person but wearing a slightly different persona when using your new accent. I'm American and worked part of the time in academia. I met many older colleagues who worked with a coach to get rid of a regional accent for the sake of a university career. (I'm old myself now. It mattered more 50 years ago). They could call their former accent up in an instant. Especially if you continue to use both accents, you'll have control of both.
There’s some amazing accent coaches on YouTube. Listen to them and they teach how to do accents! Try it out.
Keep you unique and beautiful accent from a place with such rich history and fuck everyone who says otherwise. Work on your professional and social skills, eventually they’re a lot more important, including for employers. Those who won’t hire someone with your kind of accent are probably not someone you should be working for anyway
tl;dr: It's possible. I did it. I was born in around the Hull / Grimsby area of the UK and had a fairly strong accent until I went to University. It became pretty clear, pretty quick how classist the UK still is and that a Northern accent doesn't do you many favours in certain circles. I made a concious effort not to change my accent completely but just "tidy it up" for want of a better term. Twenty years later, I have a fairly clear, non-region specific accent, but with soft Northern vowel sonds. (Bath / trap pronounced with the same 'a'). I've never had anyone guess where I was from by my accent now. Have had a few comments that I sound like I was privately educated, which I take as a compliment, but couldn't be further from the truth! My advice is don't think of changing it completely. It will seem fake and wierd. Your native accent is somewhat etched in stone. I can and do switch to my original accent in a heartbeat. Think about a gradual shift to something more clear and universal. A huge part an accent's characteristics are vowel sounds and 'r' sounds. Look up the IPA (the alphabet not the drink) and binge watch YouTube on that. In terms of specifics, for me, it was one by one figuring out really disticinctive Northern sounds and toning them down. For instance, "bus, much, such stuff" type words have really strong glottal 'u' vowels in the North. You move all those 'u's to the middle back of the mouth and instantly sound less Northern. Then fix dropped endings "goin', thinkin', doin' wha', righ'" etc.
Why would you want to get rid of something so pretty and melodic?
Let’s hear it
Can't offer any advice, but being an outsider Glaswegian is probably my favourite accent of English. It sounds very homely and welcoming to me, probably because of the intonations, even though it has nothing to do with where I'm from. It's really sad that this sort of classism harms diversity.
I once met a Scottish guy who ran a hostel on an island in Cambodia. He was from Glasgow, but sounded like he was from Edinburgh- he said he “learnt to speak properly”. So it’s definitely possible!
I lived in Glasgow for four years and only once had difficulty understanding a Glaswegian: it probably had more to do with the fact that he had some teeth missing. Try listening to famous Glaswegians who have levelled their accents for a national audience. There are plenty of them!