American Accent Test: How American Do You Sound?

A handful of sounds do most of the work. The first is the r after a vowel: Americans say the r in “car”, “park” and “door”, while standard southern British English drops it. The second is the flapped t: between two vowels, as in “water”, “better” or “little”, an American t becomes a quick tap that sounds close to a d. The third is the short a: Americans say “can’t”, “ask”, “bath” and “class” with the vowel of “cat”, where British speakers use a long “ah”. The fourth is the r-coloured vowel of “her”, “bird” and “word”.

The five sentences are built around those four features, a few words each, so one recording covers all of them. Other parts of an American accent, such as rhythm and intonation, are real but are not scored here: the test scores words.

After each sentence you see a score for every word in it. After the fifth sentence the test pools all the words and ranks them, weakest first. Each word gets a score from 0 to 100. Green (85 and up), blue (70–84), amber and red are review priorities: start with the lowest words. They are not a pass mark and not a measure of how well people understand you.

We checked that the sentences do what they claim before publishing. Read by a synthetic American voice and a synthetic British voice, the British voice scored lower on the words listed above, for example “water” (68 against 99), “can’t” (51 against 83) and “near” (48 against 100), and about the same on the rest. Real voices vary more than computer voices, so read your result as a direction, not a verdict.

Only if you want it to be. British, Australian, Indian, Nigerian and many other Englishes are complete, correct accents, and being easy to understand matters far more than sounding like any one country. Many people still choose an American target: they work with American colleagues, live in the US, or simply like how it sounds. If that is you, these four features are a good place to start.

If your goal is clear English rather than an American accent, take the general English accent test instead: its five words sound the same in American and British English.

The flapped t: say “water” as a quick “wa-der”, letting the tip of the tongue tap once behind the top teeth. Keep it light; a hard t sounds British, a full d sounds overdone. The r after a vowel: curl the tongue tip slightly back without touching the roof of the mouth, and keep it through the end of “car” and “door”. The short a: open the mouth wider than for “e” and spread the lips a little, as in “cat”, then use the same vowel in “ask”, “bath” and “after”. The r-coloured vowel: “her”, “heard” and “word” share one sound, so hold the curled-back tongue for the whole vowel instead of saying “huh” plus an r.

Practise one feature a day. Listen to the sentence (the speaker button plays it), record yourself, compare, and record again. Words that stay low after a few tries are the ones to drill.