Why you have an accent in a foreign language

Ever wondered why it's so hard to sound like a local when you go on holiday? Discover the pronunciation tips your teachers may have missed.

[tedbomba]

I had four years of intensive training in both written and spoken French and was considered to speak it on a near native level. When I joined the military my first tour of duty was, of course, Germany. I took several crash courses in spoken German so that I could travel around the country without a language barrier. As I traveled I was often teased that I was the first American they had ever met who spoke German like a native Frenchman. It was a wonderful ice breaker wherever I traveled !

[alanlee]

Interesting. I am a native Cantonese speaker. It would be in my wildest dream to imagine that Cantonese and Italian actually have something in common😅

[theamesavenue]

Stress pattern is one of the most important aspect of an accent. I have been living in the US for 5 years now, and the stress patterns were the last thing I managed to adapt to sound kinda American. It is so important that if you do the pronunciations right but don’t get the stress & pitch right, you will never sound perfect. On the flipside, if you get the stress/pitch right and pronounce a few words the non-traditional way, you will still sound very perfect.

[brianmathews]

You have an accent all the time in any language, including your own.

[Findalfen]

There was way more information in this short 3-min video than I was expecting.

[tj]

I think there is something that should also be included in this article: you are trained to listen to the sounds of your mother tongue, so when you listen to a foreign language your brain is processing it like it would your mother tongue, i.e. you don't listen for example German like a German would, you listen to German like you were listening to your mother tongue and so you will try to speak the words you listen but they are not the exact sounds a German would hear. With exposure your brain can train itself to listen to the proper sound emphasis of the foreign language and that will enhance your accent but some people never have enough exposure. I think often the listening training is ignored when teaching languages and that is a shame.

[tduongdang]

Reasons listed:
1) Individual sounds differ between languages
2) Several sounds are not possible in some languages -> people insert/adjust the sound to fit the the rules of their own
3) Differences in stress patterns
4) Differences in intonation/language rythym

[danidejaneiro]

Also some sounds just simply don’t exist in your target language. Many foreigners struggle with the two “TH” sounds in English whereas many anglophones struggle with the trilled “R” of Spanish.

[stischer]

While at a conference in Denmark, I tried to learn some phrases in Danish - primarily "I don't speak Danish, I speak English". Everyone said I spoke with a Swedish accent. Thank you "The Swedish Chef" from Sesame Street.

[Raj-yrgt]

I’m bilingual in English and Tamil (a Dravidian language from southern India).
Along the years I’ve learnt Hindi, Spanish and German to varying degrees of fluency.
My struggles with these latter languages have given me new respect for people who strive to speak in languages other than own, even if their speech is heavily accented.
What’s important after all is communication between different cultures, even if said communication is not perfect! 😊

[fatfurry]

they REALLY gotta teach this in language classes. this stuff feels so important to me but is NEVER taught in classrooms in my experience

[WhiteTiger]

When I first went to India, I had a hard time understanding the way many Indians spoke English. To me, the words just ran together with no particular emphasis. Over time, my brain learned how to sort it out. Once I began learning Hindi, it made sense to me why these speakers spoke English the way they did. And it was always speakers who had learned English in school, but never traveled out of the country to be exposed to native English speakers. The same would be true, I'm sure, for any language.

[jayjack]

Summary: Foreign accents exist because people try to speak other languages with the stresses, timings, and intonations (and sometimes grammar) of their own language. Want to sound more like a native speaker quickly? Speak their language like how they try to speak your language. Just keep in mind what dialect of their language they speak. If you want to sound from Paris, don't copy someone from Quebec City, etc.

[emteekay]

Am just disappointed that this video was extremely short...it was soooo engaging that I never wanted it to end❤

[anonglakmoonwicha]

My Dutch has a slight English accent. (Englsh is my first language)
My father once joked that I speak English like a foreigner.
My German friends tell me I speak German with a Dutch accent.
My French friends tell me I speak French with a Dutch accent.
My Thai friends tell me I speak Thai like Thai people. (I'm not entirely convinced)
My Spanish friends tell me I speak Spanish like a Peruvian (that's where I learned el Castellano)
I rarely speak Italian, but I rather suspect it sounds not like an Italian.

[stevenschilizzi]

Very true! And it’s rarely taught in language courses, let alone in schools. It’d be great to have more of these videos on specifics for different languages, at least for native English speakers. Cheers!

[tofer]

This is pretty funny because I have just started learning Spanish to connect with my family from Peru and I don't want to butcher their language so I say a couple sentences in English like my dad would with his Peruvian-accent before speaking a sentence in Spanish. It really helped! But then my family in Peru mistaken me for being fluent because my accent is polished, haha. And now I understand it's due to the stress my dad put on words. How neat!

[luisguilhermeoliveira]

This is all really interesting to know. I wish sounding like a native speaker weren't such a goal for many language learners. I think these differences are actually pretty charming and I love when I meet someone who speaks my language in a very different way.

[BlondeQtie]

i learned a lot of languages and enjoyed doing so. i always made it a point to try to imitate the sounds and pronunciations as closely to the original as possible. people tell me i speak excellent italian and a lot of english speakers believe i am native or have been living in an english speaking country for a long time 😊
the best thing was to read texts out loud, listen carefully and try to nail the intonation 🎉

[eugeneylliez]

As a scholar of Italian linguistics, allow me a correction (if it is such). Actually, Italian distinguishes length for both vowels and consonants (long and short), not only in word morphology but also and especially at the prosodic level. (Nespor, 2014). The reason why English speakers notice that syllabic homorhythm is, in my opinion, due to two main causes : 1) the fact that the stereotype of the Italian accent is actually drawn from Neapolitan, 2) the fact that an Italian locutor has a tendency not to distinguish long and short vowels in English because simply from the point of view of the Italian source phonology, English words almost never present that structure that triggers vowel elongation in Italian instead. Rather, English words invite, if anything, an Italian to double the consonant and/or add a final schewa. None of this, however, implies that Italian always has syllables of equal length, for such is only a foreign ear's impression of the Italian language.