[nu23]

Maybe, we should have an international language reform to introduce a phonetic spelling system (WYSIWYHear) which would also lead to a somewhat standardized accent. The local ways of pronouncing words, can still continue in each region. There are probably many aesthetic considerations for this. But when two people across different regions speak, they can use this system.

This would require linguists to document the phonemes, and to find a minimal set of alterations of either the spelling or the pronounciation of a word so that you have a phonetic system. There are already variations in spelling (American/British English). This would be another variation which is phonetic.

Of course, even if this this work is done, it would still be yet another standard needing popular adoption. The phonemes would also be more in number than the current letters which means either using diacritic symbols (requiring change in keyboards, slower typing) or mapping a phoneme to multiple letters (longer spellings and possibly some ambiguity in detecting phoneme boundaries in spellings).

[MSexton]

When I took an acting class on accents, I learned about the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa). It is surprisingly handy, although most Americans have no idea it exists, much less how to read it.

[nu23]

Interesting. This is a very detailed effort, with encyclopaedic ambitions across different languages. The question is if there is a lightweight version of this - someway of chosing a reasonably small set of phonemes which can represent, most English words accurately. The second part is to represent the phonemes by either using a small number of new letters and diacritics (which is what the IPA already does), or to map the phonemes directly to single letters or a string of two or three letters. With the second option, there would still be ambiguity in reading a spelling (where are the phoneme breaks?). But, the accent situation would improve and one can get used to the phoneme boundaries by looking it up for each new word.