How can I tone down my accent without RP?

[HermioneMakepeace]

I am currently overseas for work. I have a strong regional accent and no-one can understand me! It is important that I can communicate with people but it’s really difficult if no one knows what I’m saying.

I need to tone down my accent and I can put on an RP voice (I went to drama school) but I don’t want to be fake!

Any ideas? Thanks.

What is your natural accent? Can you soften the vowels without going full on RP?

Well I think if you're overseas and speaking to non-native English speakers, they won't be able to pick up on the nuances of 'fakeness' in your RP accent. They will just hear an English accent they understand as opposed to an English accent that they don't. So put on RP when speaking to non English people. Don't think of it as being fake - think of it as adapting your speech to the audience to aid communication.

Also - changing your accent so people can understand you isn't fake, it's code-switching. You aren't defined by your accent, and certainly non-native speakers won't be as aware of the baggage that accents carry here.

X post with cat! I agree!

Xiaoxiong said it much more eloquently than I did.

if your natural accent swaps consonants for glottals switch 'em back.

Thanks for your replies everyone! I have been looking at some tutorials on You Tube, so I’ll give them a go.

It depends on the accent. When I moved to London from NI, I had to deliberately slow down my speech to be understood. I've moved around a bit to various countries since then which seems to have smoothed out my accent as I don't have this problem at all any more, although my husband reckons the NI accent comes back when I'm annoyed!

Kiwi here who understands your problem.:) I had to focus on vowels, making them more English (e and i) and harden my final t's. My husband, English, had to slow down his speech and reinsert the t's (glottal stops).

Accent of course is only a small piece of the puzzle. A lot of the difficulties will disappear if you focus on simplifying your language, removing phrasal verbs and eschewing idioms in favour of neutral-->formal language. Also, learning something of the native language so you can avoid false friends and be sure you are understanding each other. That's the hard part tbh.