As strange as it may seem, I hate my accent and want to speak like an American because I think it sounds cooler and more like how I want to sound.
I’ve more or less perfected my version of an American accent on my own, I think.
But whenever I’m with other people who know me, I revert back to my old accent instinctively because that’s how they know me to sound like. I’m unsure about how I can subtly transition without them noticing a sudden change, such as through gradual exposure to my accent changing more each time they hear it. That way I could argue that I don’t know how it happened and it was a slow progression if they eventually realise it’s different, rather than something forced that I started doing one day.
The biggest thing I think is changing the pronunciation of certain words with “a”, such as going from “fahst” to “faast” for the word ‘fast’, or “mahsk” to “maask” for ‘mask’. Because it’s really one or the other, there’s no in-between. I feel like for most other sounds, a gradual transition into more American sounds can be possible, but that one’s like, how can I make the plunge and will people notice it straight away and think it’s weird?
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.)