For example, an English person called Bob might introduce themselves as “Bob”, whereas an American person called Bob might introduce themselves as “Bahb”. (Sorry, don’t know the phonetic alphabet but hopefully you get my gist)
Should you pronounce those two people’s names the same, with your own natural accent, or should you copy how the person says their own name?
Edit: I specifically picked a generic English name with different pronunciation across different accents. I know my wording wasn’t great, sorry! Hopefully the edit is a bit clearer.
Context and other languages
When pronouncing a name from a different language, I firmly believe you should copy the pronunciation of the owner of that name, and not Anglicise the name unless asked to. I say this as a speaker of a language that English people regularly mispronounce and even insist to me that they know the correct pronunciation of my language.
Yep. It’s like Michel/Michelle/Michael, if the anglo form derived not from the Hebrew but the French form; and badly: Meekul (which isn’t bad by itself, but is just uncanny-valley weird).
To make matters worse, the discordant form is popular in some famous boomer/X vocalists; so I commiserate with Sade, a local clerk, and we get to eye-roll in unison about it.
Bah. It’s not peak-discordant (imagine a ‘Moy-KELLE’ that isn’t a Michaela), so it’s no significant source of stress; just a footnote . But enough about boring me.