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.
I honestly feel like the “you’re trying to hard to pronounce the country/city/food name” vibe is silly anyways. If they pronounce it “Bærthélōnã” in Barcelona, then why shouldn’t I try to pronounce it that way? Especially these days in our hyper-connected world, I don’t really have an excuse of “well I never knew they said it that way”.
I don’t mean people who earnestly pronounce it the way they do in Barcelona, I mean the people who make a huge deal out of saying it as intensely as possible, trying to call attention to how well-traveled they are by making it sound super alien.