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accents do not put you at a disadvantage. people not being able to understand you puts you at a mega disadvantage.
if its an issue work on speech, its doable i have done it.
I agree. And do learn to cut out the regional phrases that no one else understands. This comes up frequently on the Pittsburgh forum, where some of the natives have a very odd accent, that is often accompanied by strange words such as "gumband", "redd up", "Jumbo" and others. Also use of the word "Yinz" or yunz" (which is bad grammar, IMO).
Don't lose it. As someone already said, do you really want to work for somebody that discriminates against you based on that?
If being an actor is what you want to do then I'm still not sure you'd need to loose it. Midwestern is less distinct than Southern and actors like Tommy Lee Jones have been able to have theirs.
(speaking in general here) Maybe there's a way to keep you accent and learn the General American accent as another accent and not losing the one you have. Sort of like an American pretending to do German accent and then going back to their own American one. But you'd lose your say, Midwestern one and put on a General American one. Although, that might be psychological.
Despite coming from Charleston, Colbert does not have a trace of a southern accent.
"At a very young age, I decided I was not gonna have a southern accent. Because people, when I was a kid watching TV, if you wanted to use a shorthand that someone was stupid, you gave the character a southern accent. And that's not true. Southern people are not stupid. But I didn't wanna seem stupid. I wanted to seem smart. And so I thought, 'Well, you can't tell where newsmen are from,'" Colbert explains.
At 19, he joined the Army, where his duties consisted primarily of entertaining the troops in traveling GI variety shows called "Stars and Gripes". Upon being discharged, he tried breaking into show business as a ventriloquist and stand-up comedian, but found that his thick Southern accent made his act almost unintelligible beyond the South. To overcome the accent, he went to college, majoring in education but with a strong minor in speech.
He later joined the Broadway cast of "No Time For Sergeants", where he met up with Andy Griffith. You know the rest.
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