Pronunciations and accent play an important role in the effectiveness of a speech. One wrong pronunciation can damage the argument of an otherwise good speaker. This article will discuss factors that need to be considered to improve pronunciations.

The accent of a speaker depends to a great degree on pronunciations. The pronunciation of a word is not fixed and can change from time to time. In addition, different places may have different pronunciations for the same word. Every district of a land may have its own peculiar sounds, and every succeeding generation may vary the manner of saying a word. Some people pronounce schedule with a soft ch sound whereas others don’t. The word ‘program’ can be broken into its syllables in two different forms: pro-gram and prog-ram. Many words have two regularly heard pronunciations—neither, advertisement, Elizabethan, rations, oblique, route, quinine, etc. Fashions come and go in pronunciation as in all other human interests. Some sounds may be recognized as a sign of carelessness or perversion and are never admitted into educated, cultured speech. Others thrive and have their day, only to fade when another more widely-accepted pronunciation emerges.

The first rule in pronunciation is to consult a good dictionary. This will help in most cases though not in all, as a dictionary merely records all accepted sounds. Secondly, speech is a living, growing, and changing thing. Dictionaries drop behind the times very rapidly. A regularly accepted sound may have come into general use after a dictionary gets printed. Hence, it is not necessary that the sounds depicted in the dictionary are the only acceptable sounds.

New activities and unusual events, especially those which take place on a global or national level, may throw into general conversation thousands of unused, unheard words. This is what happened at the time of the Great War, when thousands of military, industrial, naval, and aeronautical terms came into daily use.

Next to authoritative books, the best models are to be secured from the speech of authorities in each branch to which the term specifically belongs. Thus, military leaders have made the pronunciation of oblique with the long i the correct one for all military usages. The accepted sound of cantonments was fixed by the men who built and controlled them.

People who come from or live in a non-English speaking country may develop a good vocabulary but do not have much exposure to verbal communication in English. Hence, they might memorize words that even a native English speaker doesn’t know, but at the same time, they are more likely to suffer from problems with respect to their pronunciations. In this regard, listening to the radio can be a good idea. Although some people turn towards movies and television for this purpose, radio is a better choice as the attention of the audience is completely on the voice while listening to a radio.

Anyway, constant consultation of the dictionary and other books of recognized reference value, close observance of the speech of others, scrutiny of one's own pronunciation, mental criticism of others' slips, and determination to correct one's own errors are the various methods of attaining certainty of correct delivery of word sounds. To sum up, pronunciation is not something that you can master by reading a book or by taking admission in a course. It is a lengthy process which continues forever as new words keep emerging and as accents keep changing. 

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