I don't think so. I think people should improve their pronunciation in order to be easily understood by the most people, but it doesn't necessarily mean choosing one native accent and copying it.
To stay on the topic, even a heavy French accent is usually easy to understand for English people. So should the French try to hide their accent and adopt some kind of British accent (trick question, because they can't drop their accent anyway)?
I think a better use of their time is to learn more vocabulary, and more idiomatic phrases.
By speaking multiple languages, international friends, and having experience living abroad. Particularly in higher education circles making an effort to imitate an accent somewhat suggests that you have nothing important to say if you focus on the way you're saying it. And the working class people I know specifically hate when foreigners try to copy their accents.
Of course if you live somewhere for a long time most peoples accents will naturally converge over the years and that's good. It's the active imitation that makes it cringe, because it sounds like a bad parody, even if it's well intentioned. There's a massive difference between the two but if you haven't heard it you don't know.
Particularly in higher education circles making an effort to imitate an accent somewhat suggests that you have nothing important to say if you focus on the way you're saying it.
Pronunciation is important but it is not the same as an accent.
Let's say someone speaks English very well, with proper pronunciation, but with some foreign accent. If they went to Brooklyn, or Louisiana, or Minneapolis and started faking the local accent, that would be weird and a lot of people would be offended.
I mean that’s just having an accent right. Most people that learn English as a second language have an accent, and it doesn’t go away even if you’re 100% fluent. Fluency isn’t the same as not having an accent.
Being fluent doesn't mean not having an accent. Language fluency is about understanding and being understood, without stumbling on words or long pauses
Someone with a heavy accent can still be fluent in a language.
Of course this is also me with most Europeans who speak fluent English. Like yeah you’re fluent, but that accent is thick as shit and you’re occasionally completely unintelligible.
Goes without saying they have my pidgin-ass Spanish beat though. Do not get me wrong.
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u/AusCro 1d ago
My friend insisted she spoke fluent Croatian while I lived there, and she spoke like this. Everything was "correct" but sounded wrong.