Free English accent test

Listeners decide you have an accent from a handful of sounds, not from your whole speech. The usual giveaways are the two th sounds ("think", "this") said as t, d, s, z or f; r and l swapped or merged; the short i of "ship" said as the long ee of "sheep"; v, w and b used interchangeably; and final consonants dropped or softened, so "world" ends without its d.

Rhythm and melody are part of an accent too: English squeezes unstressed syllables into a quick "uh" (the schwa) and stresses one syllable per word hard. This test does not grade sentence melody. It scores five words, each built around one of those sounds, because they are the substitutions listeners notice first and the ones you can fix one at a time.

"Think" checks the quiet th: if it comes back as t ("tink") or s ("sink"), this is often the most noticeable sound in your accent. "Really" makes you switch from r to l inside one word, which is where an r/l merge shows. "Ship" checks the short i; if it scores low, you are probably saying "sheep". "Very" checks a clean v made with the teeth on the lower lip, not a w or a b. "World" packs an r-coloured vowel and the ending "-rld" into one syllable, so it catches both a missing r and a dropped final d.

Read the result as a ranking. After the fifth word the test orders your words from weakest to strongest and names the sound behind the weakest one, which is where practice pays off fastest. A low score on one word does not mean your English is bad: it points at the sound that word was chosen to test.

Your first language predicts your accent remarkably well, because it decides which English contrasts you never had to hear. Spanish and Portuguese speakers most often merge ship/sheep and b/v and add a vowel before "s" ("eschool"). Russian and Ukrainian speakers tend to replace th with s or z, use a rolled r, and merge the two i vowels. German speakers often say w as v ("wery") and devoice final consonants ("dok" for "dog"). French speakers drop the h and stress the last syllable.

Japanese and Korean speakers usually find r and l hardest, and add a vowel after final consonants; Korean speakers also merge f/p and v/b. Chinese and Vietnamese speakers most often drop or blur final consonants and replace th with s or f. Arabic speakers commonly merge p with b and v with f. Speakers of Hindi, Urdu and other South Asian languages often merge v and w and use a tapped r. The test page in your own language explains the results in your language.

The reference is standard American English, but the five words were chosen so that the sounds being scored are the same in General American and standard British English. The test does not tell you which accent you have, and it does not score you down for sounding British, Australian or Indian. It scores how close each word comes to what an English listener expects to hear.

That is also the honest answer to "how strong is my accent": the ranking shows which of these sounds give your first language away, word by word. It is not a certificate or an exam grade, and it does not measure grammar, vocabulary or fluency.

Work on one sound at a time, starting with your lowest score. Learn where the tongue and lips go (each guide below has a mouth-position tip and audio), then practise the sound in minimal pairs: think/sink, light/right, ship/sheep, very/berry. Record yourself saying the pair and listen back, or let the checker score it, until both words sound different.

Then put the sound back into real words and sentences you actually use. Ten minutes a day on one sound beats an hour on everything at once. Take the test again after a week: if your weakest sound has moved up, move on to the next one.