Does where one learns an language impact what their accent is?
For example, say a French person learns English in England and another one learns it in the States, would they would similar? Is the inherent “Frenchiness” enough to counteract the accent of the taught language?
My English father spoke fairly fluent French. His friends in Brittany teased him about his Parisian accent. When it comes to American vs English, there is a whole lot more than ‘accent’. There are a great many ways in which American English differs from English English.
One would sound English-leaning, one would sound American-leaning, generally.
I observe this a lot, because a hell of a lot more ESL speakers learn English from Americans (and somewhat more learn it from British folk) than learn it from Australians, so large numbers of people with near-perfect English are immediately spottable as not-aus-raised due to their American or trans-Atlantic twang.
Back when I was at Uni, the guy who ran the pizza shop we went to had a hybrid Italian-Scottish accent. That was pretty unique.
Of course different people will also have different amounts of their original base accent show through too, depending on how much English-speaking-environment they’ve had, and how early they learned.
I think all around, that happens very often. For instance I often encounter first generation Turkish immigrants to Germany, who learned German as a second language and speak it with mixed Turkish-Bavarian, Turkish-Swabian or Turkish-Westphalian accent, according to where they have lived and worked.
Australian friends who taught English in Japan said they got less work through their agency than American teachers because students wanted to have American-accented English because they thought it would be more business-oriented.
In my experience, English teachers in Germany tend to speak with a generic “English” English accent, probably closest to RP. There are exceptions, though.
The probable reasons:
This mostly hold true for my teachers when I went to school in the 1990s. I believe, that younger teachers nowadays are more likely to spend their term abroad in the US, OZ, NZ or another far-away country, as travel has become vastly cheaper and easier in the past two decades. I believe that this also has an impact on the version of English that they teach.
All that said, the pupils in my class mostly spoke a version of “English” English (with a varying degree of German accent on top). One of my classmates tried to adopt an American accent - on purpose - because, you know, teenagers…
I was recently told by an Englishman that I speak English with a slight Scottish-German accent. I have some Scottish ancestry and relatives, so that might be the source of that.
I once encountered a weird example of a person acquiring an accent that I wouldn’t have expected. A couple of years ago I was at a restaurant in England where I noticed that the waitress spoke with an American accent. I asked her where she was from. She said that she was British and had never visited the U.S. Just before she was born, her father had been assigned a job by the British company that he worked for which was working for their Brazilian subsidiary. She spent the first twenty-two years of her life in Brazil. In the city where she lived there were two schools for English-speaking families who wanted their children to grow up speaking English, one for British families and one for American families. Her mother checked out both of them carefully and decided that the American one was a better school. So this woman (the waitress) spent all her time in elementary and high school with Americans. When she was twenty-two, she moved back to the U.K. She told me that she spoke with a different accent than the rest of her family, having picked up the accent of her schoolmates rather than that of her family.
My nieces (in’law) are like this. They are half British/half Swiss, spent their early years in the UK, then went to international schools in Germany and Brazil. They speak with a distinctly American drawl, unlike anything their parents speak. They now (aged 16) live just outside Detroit, so that kind of worked out for them.
I remember going into a deli in Florence a few years ago where the girl serving me spoke English with a clear Yorkshire accent. She’d never been to the UK, but had learned English from her mother who was from York.
I used to have dealings with a woman in Puglia (southern Italy) who spoke English with a slight Welsh accent. She’d partly grown up in North Wales. Weirdly, her english was actually quite limited which was disconcerting as she sounded like a Brit.
I read the OP a little different. If one French person learns English in England and one in the US, their English would sound different. But, would the French accent be the same?
A different example… I live in the Southern US. Syllables are added to words. For example, sit and “see it” sound the same.
If someone from here learns Spanish, they could add syllables to Spanish words. So, buenos dias might become six syllables.
If the same person learns German the “staccato” (I’m not sure the correct term) in the language would affect how they pronounce the words and wouldn’t add the extra syllables. So, they may lose part of the southern drawl.
Absolutely yes. Have you ever heard a Japanese guy speaking (American) English with a southern accent? I have.
I’m not aware of any studies in the area and can only pile on with the anecdotes, having heard various Europeans with different degrees of British pronunciation.
And my Spanish friends all think I sound Mexican when I speak Spanish. Which makes sense, given that I learned Spanish in El Paso.
Thank you all for the answers.
The accent heard while learning a language is an important influence on how you will speak. But there is also there is the influence of the accent or dialect you speak in your native language. Some dialects are very strong and carry over when speaking another language. I remember two Italian collegues, one speaking almost BBC English, from north Italy. The other was really difficult to understand and I was told he was from Naples. His collegue said he also found his dialect hard to follow sometimes when they spoke Italian. Some people are also very quick to pick up new accents while others keep the same accent all their lives.
So I guess how you end up speaking depends on what both yourself and your teacher bring to the table.
It always seems obvious to me that this factor is why Jean-Luc Picard speaks with an English accent - he grew up in France, so he learned English in England.
I’m not sure if this is what the OP is asking for, but Hong Kong and Singapore British English has a distinct Cantonese accent to my ears.
I don’t speak Cantonese, but have heard enough through movies/TV and in person, that to me Carmen’s Cantonese https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcRzyTLjVoY has a distinct Australian accent, which is were she grew up.
There’s also muscle memory. Different languages require different tongue placement that requires muscle training.
Then there’s the Yanny/Laurel thing to some extent. How your brain interprets sounds probably affect your accent. Listen to a deaf person speaking in different languages, to my ears there’s a distinct deaf accent if they haven’t heard any speech. I was ready to dismiss this idea when I watched this video of deaf children speaking different languages, but learned that they’re not completely deaf and can hear with a hearing aid.
Last time we were in Paris, there was a little hole in the wall pizza place where I would go to get us pizza. I chatted several times with one of the staff, who had a British accent in her French. One time she switched to English - turned out she was English. She asked me where I was from. She said: “I’ve heard you speak English with your family, and it’s American. Except it’s not. And your French is good, but it’s not like a normal French accent. But it’s not a foreign accent, just not regular French, with some English.”
I told her I was from Canada and she said that would explain it.
Age and I suspect therefore muscle memory as I talked about above, also has an affect on language learning and accents. As stated in this article: At What Age Does Our Ability to Learn a New Language Like a Native Speaker Disappear? - Scientific American
“Based on people’s grammar scores and information about their learning of English, the researchers developed models that predicted how long it takes to become fluent in a language and the best age to start learning. They concluded that the ability to learn a new language, at least grammatically, is strongest until the age of 18 after which there is a precipitous decline. To become completely fluent, however, learning should start before the age of 10.”
I know people who immigrated before age 10 who never spoke English before, who are able to speak both English and their native tongue (to my limited knowledge of their native language) fluently without any accent.
I was once walking down a street in Montreal and heard a woman ahead of speaking what I thought was English with a strong British accent. When I caught up with her I realized she was actually speaking French–with a strong British accent. I am quite familiar with French spoken with an English Canadian (or American) accent and this wasn’t that.
Once I gave a short course in a French language Belgian university. I offered them the choice of my American English or my rather poor French. They told me that, while everyone there spoke English, they were an older generation who had learned British English and would have a great deal of trouble understanding my American English.
Someone I know who learned their Spanish in Mexico was kidded here in Panama because she had such a strong Mexican accent.
My first Spanish teacher in high school was from Spain, and had the so-called Castilian “lisp” (not actually a lisp). Our textbooks, however, concentrated on Latin American Spanish. Since I’ve learned most of my Spanish since from Latin Americans, I’m sure that can be recognized. However, I have studiously tried to avoid picking up a Panamanian accent. It would be like picking up a Brooklynese accent in English. 
Most Spaniards I know probably learned British English, but I don’t usually pick that up in their accent. However, I can often tell that they are Spanish rather than Latin American from the way they speak English. I can also sometimes tell Argentinians because their accent bleeds through into their English.
I learned German in Berlin, and I’m often told I have a Berlin accent when speaking German. In Austria a couple of people even guessed where I learned German, and that was nearly twenty years after I last lived there.
However, that was partly because I lived and mixed with a lot of Berliners. If I’d stayed with the international students then my accent would probably have been more generic German (plus English, of course).