Clarity, not accent

Your accent is fine

Everyone has an accent, native speakers included. Someone from Scotland or Texas sounds different from someone from Kenya or Nigeria, and English works for all of them. In fact, about three in four people who speak English learned it as a second language, just like you (Ethnologue, 2026).

A Rwandan accent is fine too: it tells people you speak more than one language. This guide does not try to replace your accent. It only works on the few sounds that can change a word's meaning, so listeners hear the word you meant.

Research backs this up. Munro and Derwing found that a strong foreign accent does not necessarily make speech harder to understand (Language Learning, 1995).

Communication can be remarkably successful when foreign accents are noticeable or even strong … there is no clear correlation between accent and understanding.

— John Levis, applied linguist (TESOL Quarterly, 2005)

Why we wrote this guide

In Rwanda, we have seen a number of people lose clarity by trying to imitate an accent, in most cases the American one. The trouble comes from a few American sounds that collide with a different Kinyarwanda sound.

The American tapped t is so close to the Kinyarwanda r that, when a Kinyarwanda speaker copies it, it comes out as an r: writing turns into riding, and better into 'berrer' or 'beller'. The American r after a vowel adds extra r sounds, and any of them can be heard as l. The rules help you avoid these collisions, so you can stay clear without imitating anyone.

Research points to the same few sounds

When people from different countries speak English to each other, some sounds cause far more misunderstandings than others. The linguist Jennifer Jenkins studied which ones. Her list includes three things this guide works on: a full t between vowels, as in water and better (Rule 1); r and l kept apart (Rule 3); and long and short vowels kept apart, as in ship and sheep (Rule 6). Other features, such as the th sound or the melody of your sentences, mattered much less (The Phonology of English as an International Language, 2000).

The t has also been tested on its own. In a 2022 study with 78 European learners of English, words were understood less often when the t was tapped, as it often is in American English, than when it was a full t (Social Sciences & Humanities Open). We have seen the same in Rwanda: the tapped t sounds like the Kinyarwanda r, so the two get mixed up.