Your accent can be an incredible accent – and yet many English learners are focused on reducing or changing their accent. Is this necessary? Find out in this week’s episode: Here is the full transcript: Your accent is awesome. Hi there. I’m Paul Urwin, and welcome to the Business English Community podcast, where the world of business meets the English language. We discuss culture, strategies, techniques, vocabulary, grammar, and much, much more. Find out more at businessenglishcommunity.com. Hi there. Paul here, and welcome to episode 17 of the Business English Community podcast. Two things today before we get cracking. The first one is please, if you do like the podcast, take one minute out of your day to go to iTunes and give us a review on iTunes. That’s something that is really, really, really, really, really helpful for us because it helps us to share our message around the globe. It allows us to help more and more and more people with their business English. So, please, if you do have a minute, please just go and give us a review on iTunes. The second thing I wanted to ask or say to you is that I really want to hear your story. What’s your story? What’s your story with learning English, and what’s your story with business English? Where do you live? What challenges do you face right now? Are you looking for a job? Are you trying to get a promotion? Are you trying to improve your business English so that you can get a position in another country? Whatever it might be, please let me know your story. I’m waiting to hear from you, so you can contact me via the website, which is businessenglishcommunity.com. There’s a contact form on the website, which makes it really easy to submit something. Or, you can send me an email if you prefer. You can email me at info, I-N-F-O, @businessenglishcommunity.com. Let me know your story. I can’t wait to hear from you. Okay, well let’s get on with today’s main topic, and that is your accent is awesome. I really wanted to talk about this because I get a lot of questions about accent reduction. How do I change my accent? How do I get an American accent? How can I speak with a British accent? And so on. I can understand where those questions come from. Maybe you’ve seen an actress with a really attractive American, British, Canadian, or some other accent. They’re successful. They’re successful people, and they are completely confident in their use of the English language. So, why wouldn’t you want to copy them or imitate them? It makes sense that you might want to imitate them, and actually, imitating is a really good technique for improving your pronunciation. It’s something I talk about back in episode 15, so that’s episode 15, How to Improve Your Pronunciation in English. But, and here’s the issue. Your accent is amazing. Your accent is awesome, and for me, it’s part of your identity. It reflects who you are, it reflects your experiences, and it reflects your culture. Many people don’t like their own accents, but it’s strange because for every person who doesn’t like their own accent, there seem to be thousands of people out there who love that person’s particular accent and the way that they pronounce things in English. So, is it just you that doesn’t like your accent, or do other people say that they don’t like your accent? Because that would be something completely different. But I’m willing to bet that many, many, many people absolutely love your accent. Over the years, I’ve spoken to people from Mexico, Iran, Brazil, France, Germany, Holland, Korea, Egypt, China, Japan, Israel, Columbia, Peru, Argentina, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, and many others, people who have awesome accents. So, why would you want to change your amazing accent? If it’s to communicate effectively or to communicate more effectively, then I completely u