That’s a good point and a common question. Changing an accent is not entirely about other people, it is mostly about the person’s ability to communicate effortlessly and be understood when they speak. If I go to France and speak French in a British accent without pronouncing the R the way the French do, they will struggle to understand me and constantly ask me to repeat myself. In return this will diminish my confidence and reduce the amount of times I speak to people. I have experienced this myself when I had to break out of the Somali-English accent I adopted from my parents. I was butchering the English language by pronouncing all P as B (because the Somali language doesn’t have the letter P). I also had to change my accent when I studied Arabic because speaking Arabic in an English accent was once again butchering the Arabic language and even changing the meaning of what I was saying. I have actually written a blog post on this that you can find here.
I speak in 3 different accents and I love it. When I speak English, I sound like a native English speaker, when I speak Somali I sound like a native Somali speaker, when I speak Arabic I sound like a native Arabic speaker. Every language in the world is special and beautiful and I strongly believe that by adopting the accent that language is spoken in, is to honour it and sound beautiful when speaking it. I’d love to know what you think.