# Are there American (US) accents in languages other than English? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 19, 2011, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411 "2011-05-19T04:11:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![An\_Gadai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@An\_Gadai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Gadai)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/81 "2011-05-23T01:34:01Z")
As regards Pennsylvania Dutch German and German German, my German German acquaintance overheard Pennsylvania Dutch German speakers and claimed they were incomprehensible to her, I’m not sure how hard she tried. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/82 "2011-05-23T04:42:38Z")
> [@Pyper](#): > > That’s exactly how I feel about Italian. The pronunciation is very close to Spanish, but you have to put on this silly sing-song accent. Every time I spoke Italian, I felt like I was embarrassing myself with this spicy meata-balla inflection, but that’s how they talk! Right there is why children are so much better at learning languages than adults. Children think it’s fun to mimic, and they have a natural talent at it. But when they mimic someone who talks funny, their parents and teachers are horrified, mortified, and scold them not to do that. So we all grow up with heavy inhibitions about mimicking. But that very activity of young children is precisely what it takes to learn to speak a language accurately. As an adult, I’ve had to consciously decouple my shame and inhibition about mocking others and approach it with the innocence of a young child. People ask me how did I learn so many languages so easily. Well, this had a lot to do with it. We adults still have that ability, if only we don’t fight it and suppress it. We just have to distinguish between legitimate (language learning) and non-legitimate (mockery) ways of applying it. Just make sure you mimic real native speakers of the language and avoid the stereotyped accents used by comedians. I.e. can the “stage Irish” and the spicy meatballs. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/83 "2011-05-23T04:56:34Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Henry Kissinger has said that he speaks English with a German accent and German with an American accent and there’s nowhere where he sounds like a native. Kissingers’s brother has a great quote attributed to him, possibly apocryphal. Supposedly, when asked why Henry has such a strong accent and he had no noticeable accent, he said, “I listen to people and Henry doesn’t.” ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/84 "2011-05-23T05:18:05Z")
> [@Raguleader](#): > > I’ve been told that Americans who study Chinese tend to speak it in a relatively tone-deaf manner, a bit more dependent on context than native Mandarin speakers would. I know that a lot of the folks in our class also tended to import idoms from English that were totally meaningless in Chinese (“Ni Muqin hen xihuan zuo wode feiji!” Actually, that one’s pretty close to meaningless in English too.) “Your mother likes to ride my airplane?” 😕 ---
**Author:** ![Raguleader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/258eb7/32.png) [@Raguleader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raguleader)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/85 "2011-05-23T08:28:00Z")
> [@Koxinga](#): > > “Your mother likes to ride my airplane?” 😕 Like I said it’s pretty close to meaningless in English too. Basically a silly “Your Mom” joke. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 9:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/86 "2011-05-23T09:04:42Z")
I once tried to tell someone in Chinese, “your mom’s like a bus, cause guys are always getting on and off her all day” – but I only left them puzzled. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_of\_Lucan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/dbc845/32.png) [@Michael\_of\_Lucan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Michael_of_Lucan)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 12:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/87 "2011-05-23T12:41:08Z")
> [@Pyper](#): > > Okay, really sorry for three posts in a row, but I think I have the definitive answer on the Castilian “ll.” > > See [post #24](http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=131574&page=2) on this page, which quotes the linguistic text by Hualde (2005). Apparently the Castilian “ll” used to be a “palatal lateral,” which is distinct from an English “y.” However, in the past 50 years, pronunciation has shifted so that nearly all Castilian speakers pronounce “ll” as indistinguishable from “y” except in a few isolated areas. > > Please note, the palatal lateral formerly used in “ll” is not the same as an English “ly” sound like in “million.” It is a distinctive sound. Wikipedia has examples of both the old and new [pronunciation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ll). i first learned Spanish in the 1960s, so I guess that explains it. The Spanish lady who taught me took huge trouble to give me that soft “l” overtone in “ll”. She said only americanos pronounced it like “y” - and she meant that to be an insult. So I was surprised to be attacked for it here. English speech is increasingly Americanised because of the impact of US media, so it’s not surprising if the same is happening to Spanish. ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/88 "2011-05-23T16:48:00Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Quebec French is a different-sounding accent from metropole French. People in France have told me how Quebec speech sounds rustic and old-fashioned to them. > [@jasg](#): > > My instructors at DLI told me that French Canadian was closer to 18th century French than modern French. Many post-18th century words were completely different. Char and voiture spring to mind. The first means ‘car’ in Canada but ‘tank’ in France… Quebec French also uses different [profanity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity) than Metropolitian French. And Quebec French also uses more feminine endings for professions rather than refering to women with masculine nouns (ie _l’avocate_, _la docteure_, _la travailleuse_, _l’ambassadrice_, etc). ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2011, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/89 "2011-05-23T18:06:15Z")
> [@Michael\_of\_Lucan](#): > > i first learned Spanish in the 1960s, so I guess that explains it. The Spanish lady who taught me took huge trouble to give me that soft “l” overtone in “ll”. She said only americanos pronounced it like “y” - and she meant that to be an insult. So I was surprised to be attacked for it here. > > English speech is increasingly Americanised because of the impact of US media, so it’s not surprising if the same is happening to Spanish. I don’t recall any attacks, but even if you’d learned Spanish later, often language teachers are more picky than regular speakers - or even, in the case of languages with Academies, than those venerable institutions. They often try to teach some sort of “Standard [insert language here]” which will rarely if ever be found on the street. To wit: - teachers of Spanish who teach “Valladolid Spanish minus its grammatical defects” (what they call Castillian), - my cousin’s teachers of Catalan, who weren’t Catalan themselves and who could rant for hours on the difference between two kinds of S - a difference they were completely unable to pronounce; one of them was the kind of Andalusian who turns 90% of S into Z (in either Spanish or Catalan), - teachers of Basque who teach and accept only Batua, an artificial dialect invented for the purpose of being the standard, - or all those teachers of English who try to teach Her Majesty’s English to people who are a lot more likely to lay hands on US-accented movies and songs than on BBC series (plus, BBC series and British movies have people with all kinds of British accents, the people in Eastenders or Dr Who don’t all use Received Pronunciation). ---
**Author:** ![Rodgers01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b19c9b/32.png) [@Rodgers01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rodgers01)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2011, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/90 "2011-05-25T16:50:15Z")
OP here; sorry to have neglected my own thread(!). Thanks for the many interesting responses. Most of you seem to have understood what I was asking, but for those for whom there is lingering confusion: I am _not_ asking if there is an accent when an American whose first language is English learns a foreign tongue - clearly there almost always is. What I wanted to know is how/if non-English language groups in the US have formed their own, distinct accents that are audibly different from the language as spoken in any home countries. So, for example, has the Mandarin spoken in long-established American Chinatowns branched off to the point where a person born in one and raised speaking Chinese is recognizably speaking an accent of the language that tags him as American Chinese, as opposed to someone from Beijing. Sounds like that is the case for a lot of language…kind of cool! ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2011, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/91 "2011-05-25T16:57:09Z")
> [@Rodgers01](#): > > So, for example, has the Mandarin spoken in long-established American Chinatowns branched off to the point where a person born in one and raised speaking Chinese is recognizably speaking an accent of the language that tags him as American Chinese, as opposed to someone from Beijing. Historically, the Chinese communities in the United States spoke Cantonese, so you’d want to know if their accent was different from someone from Kwangtung, rather than someone from Peking. ---
**Author:** ![Raguleader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/258eb7/32.png) [@Raguleader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raguleader)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2011, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/92 "2011-05-25T20:54:45Z")
I remember reading that many of the Italian Americans stationed in Italy during WWII were fluent in Italian, having learned from their families… but could not speak Italian with the locals due to dialect differences. Evidently it had something to do with linguistic changes in Italy and the US over a few generations. ---
**Author:** ![Hypnagogic\_Jerk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hypnagogic_jerk/32/4252_2.png) [@Hypnagogic\_Jerk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypnagogic_Jerk)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2011, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/93 "2011-05-25T22:47:06Z")
Might also be that Italy has a lot of regional languages (although today most Italians know standard Italian), so perhaps those Italian-American soldiers just weren’t stationed in the right region. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2011, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/94 "2011-05-26T04:11:31Z")
Piedmontese is no more intelligible to Sicilians than French is. And vice versa. ---
**Author:** ![appleciders](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85f322/32.png) [@appleciders](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/appleciders)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2011, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411/95 "2011-05-26T04:57:27Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > I thought that Cajun French was from the same source as Acadian French (Maritime Provinces) in Canada - have they diverged? Uh, yeah, quite a bit. Quebecois is usually fairly intelligible to a native Frenchman, but Cajun French may not be. I have a good friend from Louisiana who has spent about a year studying in France; she claims that backwoods Cajun French resembles French words constructed on an English syntax. Kind of. So Cajun French is probably a good example of what the OP’s looking for-- Cajun French represents a drastic regional shift in a non-English language in America. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-american-us-accents-in-languages-other-than-english/582411.md?page=4)