About Ryan

Accent coach, teacher and founder, based in Chiang Mai.

I'm Ryan Chappell, the coach behind Accent Forge.

My path into this started years ago in a university anthropology course on linguistics. Something about how communication actually works, what makes it land or fail, stuck with me. That interest carried through two very different parts of my career since, building and running Metal Studio, a jewelry business where clear, trustworthy communication with customers was everything, and teaching at Chiang Mai University, where precision and structure in language mattered just as much.

Across both, I kept noticing the same gap. Skilled, capable professionals whose ideas weren't landing the way their expertise deserved, not because of what they knew, but because of how it came out. That gap is where Accent Forge started.

Running my own business shapes how I coach today, practical, results focused, and built to actually work in a professional setting, not academic for its own sake. I have 20 years of experience, and accent reduction has become the center of my work.

Here is the thing most people get wrong about accents: everyone has one, including me. Nobody speaks from nowhere. The goal was never to erase that, it is to understand exactly how you are shaping sound, and where you actually have flexibility to shape it differently. That only comes from real awareness, which is why the Baseline works the way it does, a guided starting point built on recognition, not a generic score.

I live and work across language and culture every day in Chiang Mai, so I don't coach accent reduction as an outside observer, I live inside the same questions I ask my students to think about.

I work with professionals from Chiang Mai, Thailand, but the coaching happens wherever you are.