KEY POINTS:
Call Centre workers with strong accents and immigrants looking for jobs are being targeted by "accent reduction specialists" who promise to turn them into true Kiwi speakers.
Voice Culture, a speech and language therapy company, touts its accent reduction programme as a "solution to strong foreign accents".
Founder
and speech therapist Alison Owen said New Zealand's new immigrants and their employers were looking for ways to make them better understood.
Her website and corporate programmes target call centres and other businesses where unclear communication irritates customers.
She was inspired to start up the programme from her own experiences with accented people.
These included "telephone calls that I had with people where I could not understand a word of what was being said at the other end, and talking to other people about the whole frustration of not being able to understand somebody".
It was also a frustration for the accented person, because they weren't being taken as seriously as they should have been, she said.
Many people seeking Owen's services are already in employment, or want to make a good impression at job interviews.
"There's a huge variety of countries - obviously a lot of Asian countries, and European countries... You're not looking to remove their accent, what you're looking to do is reduce the problems of understanding."
Owen said some companies were concerned about losing money, if the heavily accented person was in a frontline sales position.
Reducing or modifying accents through coaching involves repetition of words and sentences, listening to recordings of New Zealand voices and learning intonation and expression.
Voice coach David England also offers accent modification services. He said that many of his clients spoke English well but were hindered by their strong accent. He has been coaching Fulton Hogan engineer Chang Lai for the past six months and Lai said he had noticed an improvement in his ability to be understood.
"My boss wanted me to learn how to speak clearly, and talk to people, because I have to talk to a lot of different people... Saying 'l' and 'r' are hard for me."
He said it was words such as "priority" and "obstruction" that he struggled with.
Gary Chen, an engineer who moved here seven years ago from China, has heard of accent reduction services and would like to try them.
"I think it's really important because I speak with my colleagues, and since I started working here my language has got better and better, but one guy said to me my accent was still very strong to him." Chen said he wouldn't necessarily want to sound exactly like a Kiwi, but he would "like to sound something closer to standard English".
Bookkeeper Mei Ye, who has been in New Zealand for three years, would like to sound like a New Zealander. "Kiwi accents are very nice. They always raise up at the end of a sentence, like a question." Both Owens and England say the Kiwi accent is becoming more distinctly our own. "Kiwis distort vowels before the letter 'l', pronouncing 'mulk' instead of 'milk'," England said.
Our vowel sounds and structures mark our accent as different, "but it varies. There are intonations too: some go up at the end of a sentence, some go down, some grunt."
English language full of pitfalls
Silent letters in words such as "thumb" and "knife" are confusing for new speakers of English, and they often pronounce them.
Sounds like "ough" have many different ways of pronunciation, depending on the word. For example, "though", "rough" and "through".
The "i" sound - non-English speakers often say "sheep" when they mean "ship".
The "th" is hard for Asian speakers. Often it is pronounced as "d" or "t" - "dat" instead of "that".
The "r" sound can be difficult, with some pronouncing it as an "l" instead, such as "load" instead of "road".
