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5 Ways to Ensure your American English Regional Dialect is Understood

• 5 Ways to Ensure your American English Regional Dialect is Understood
• Be aware of how often you use idioms or descriptive phrases that are not literal
• If you want to say ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’, try to simplify it by saying, ‘I think we can find another solution’
• If you know that you drop certain letters in words, try to be hyper vigilant to pronounce letters that help others understand you, especially during conference calls when people cannot see your face
• Whenever you can, make sure the video is on during a conference call (this helps with understanding)
• Start to notice which vocabulary words people ask about, and when possible, try to use your preferred word and also a synonym, to ensure understanding

A study was done with accents, which concluded that we trust accents that sound more like our own. Although, the study also noted that those who sounded most confident were trusted the most, accent or no accent. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a foreign accent either; the fact is, we trust those who have the same background as we do, and your accent says a lot about that past: values, education, same upbringing, similar understanding of situations, and more. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to english dialects. Worldwide, there are over 160. Keep an eye out for them and get to know where people are from. Accents and dialects can bring people close together or farther apart, but we hope, with a certain perspective about dialects and accents, that our curiosities about them will bring us closer together.

Using American Dialects to Bring Us Closer Together
When you’re traveling abroad, and it’s been 10+ days of hearing only Japanese, reading (Ha!) only Japanese on street signs and subway tunnels, and then, all of a sudden you hear someone speaking in English… what do you do?

Thank your pay attention

• Thank your pay attention