Singing lessons. I’m honestly not even kidding.

I’m an American who grew up in a part of the country called Appalachia. My native accent is often associated with being uneducated and stupid, so I learned how to change it when I was a young adult.

The thing that helped me most was voice lessons that taught me how to control the muscles in the nasopharynx, throat, tongue. The reason that’s difficult is because you can’t see the way those muscles move when someone else speaks or sings, so you can’t just mimic what they’re doing. It takes a little bit more effort to learn.

Learning how to sing classical western music (opera type stuff) allowed me to learn how to speak in that kind of just generic Midwestern American accent that has less negative social associations.

Now, that being said, I also have Indian friends who grew up in the United States who still speak with a similar Indian accent as their immigrant parents, and it’s really no big deal. So you could just roll with your native accent.

(And also, I still code switch back into my native accent when I’m talking to my family or I visit my home region. Your native accent never goes away even when you learn a different way of speaking.)