Hi everybody, welcome back to Ask Alicia, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them.

Maybe. Let's get to your first question this week.

First question this week comes from Trish Garb. Hi Trish. Trish says,

How do you validate the correct pronunciation of a word when a variety of English exists and is accepted in one's culture and society. Thanks. I'm really curious about your thoughts on this.

Yeah, super great question.

There are lots of different English accents, lots of different ways of speaking English.

There are lots of different ways of expressing ourselves.

So how do we know what the correct pronunciation is of a word?

My answer to this would be that you choose

the pronunciation that fits with the type of English you are studying or the type of English

you are trying to apply. So, for example, I'm an American English speaker. That means I'm going

to use American English pronunciation with all of the words in my vocabulary.

I'm not going to choose British English here or Scottish English there or Australian English there.

Maybe if I want to practice those accents, I can do that for some reason, or if I'm talking to a friend that uses that accent, I might want to try it out for something.

But generally, in my everyday speech, I'm always going to use American English.

You can kind of think of it as like a set, right?

I'm studying American English, therefore I should always use American English pronunciation.

So the same thing can be true for anybody else, anybody studying any type of any language, really. If you want to study English and you want to study British English, great.

Make sure you study British English pronunciation.

If you're studying English and you find yourself surrounded by lots of Australian English speakers,

you'll probably want to practice Australian pronunciation.

So I would say it's not necessarily about saying,

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