This is a question for those of you who regularly speak a language (or regional dialect) other than your native language (or regional dialect), and speak your current language with an accent.
Do you actually hear the accent as you speak? And if so, why can’t you “correct” it and lose the accent (not that you really have to)? Or do you literally not hear your accent, and are then surprised when you hear yourself in a recording . . . or when other people tell you that you have an accent?
I speak a little French, and to my own ears I have no American accent whatsoever. But I know that when I’m speaking to someone in France, they’re hearing an American accent.
When I speak Italian, I can definitely hear the instances in which my American accent is stronger than usual. Sometimes my vowels will come out flat, or I’ll trip over a “gl” combination or a rolled R. I make a concerted effort to sound as Italian as possible, but sometimes there’s a disconnect between my brain and my speech apparatus, and the sounds simply don’t come out the way I’d like them to. I know I sound a lot better than an American who is making no attempt whatsoever to overcome their American accent, but there is no way I sound like a native Italian speaker.
I’m now learning Russian, and there are certain sounds that I flat-out can’t make (the letter ы is the worst) and have to fudge. I can’t make, and can only sometimes hear, the distinctions between the hard and soft consonants. I do try, though – I roll my Rs, I do my very best to imitate my Russian professor’s vowel sounds, but I feel like I’m speaking Russian with an Italian accent.
My brother was talking to a mutual friend of ours who is from DC/Virginia. The friend says my brother is the only person he knows from Cleveland without a Cleveland accent.
At that point, I admitted that I know use the Cleveland “a” sound. This was a week or so ago and now I hear myself do it all the time. Yech!
Yeah, in my native tongue English people always say I have a NYC acent (I only lived there four or five years, plus a long time in WNYU, which has its own accent, but thank gawd I only got used to more the Bronx accent, not the true WNY accent – it don’t make sense to me). Weird. I for sure have a slight American accent in French, but I can’t really hear it and most people are too polite to say I sound like a pig. But I can hear it in both languages, if I try hard enough. I don’t usually talk to people unless I have some booze around me, though, so I tend to not notice. But thinking about it, I can hear some differences.
Only when I say words with “-ill.” Like “pill” and “hill.” I didn’t know I pronounced these words in a Sourthern style until I moved up north and people laughed at me. Now whenever I say them, I’m aware of how I stretch them out so that they are indistinguishable from their “-eel” counterparts.
In my native language I have an accent I am, and have to be, told, but born and raised here I wouldn’t know where I picked it up. In English I have an accent that I can hear and change but not do away with and I’m sure I have one in German and French but I wouldn’t for the life of me know it if I heard one.
When I first moved out west after having grown up in Chicago, I thought the dialect was pretty bland. I can tell now that my own accent has changed, though, because after 10 minutes conversing with my Chicago family members, I can hear my own voice get more nasal and that Chicago “A” really comes out. It cheers me up immeasurably, as I feel I’m “talking right” again. You can take the girl out of Chicago, but you can’t take da accent out of da girl.
yeppers…especially when i get tired, i sling the ol’ Southern drawl…I get sweeter’n a glass o’tea, darlins…but surprisingly when conscious i speak with a non-accent (i guess thats what you call it).
I have been told by my co-workers that when i get beyond tired, i sound like larry the cable guy’s brother inlaw…the one that married his sister with the mole on her face…
My experience is not quite the same but very similar. When I am not thinking about it I later realize I have been doing the Southern accent. When thinking about it I speak softer and deliberately enunciate a less conspicuous Southern accent.
Heh. Regional accent isn’t what the OP was really talking about, but I find that tireness does make me sound more like a stereotypical northern New Englander. I generally pronounce my terminal Rs, but if I’m really tired, it might come out like “would you go down stayahs and check the doah to make sure it’s locked? No, not those stayahs, the ones over theyah.”
Even if you can hear it, it doesn’t mean you actually have the ability to correct it consciously. For example, I know that my Spanish accent sucks, to the point that some people think I’m making a caricature. But I have not been able to fix it to sound like the real thing.
Similarly, I’ve been watching a lot of shows in Japanese lately, and I can hear my American accent when I say the same words, but I cannot figure out how to sound Japanese.
When most people learn an accent, it comes less from conscious use and more from just experience. You hear it enough, and you pick it up.
I speak German near-fluently and with a negligible accent, but I cannot get my tongue wrapped around the umlauts. (Generally not a big deal, except notably in the difference between the word ‘schwül’ (humid) and ‘schwul’ (gay).) I didn’t start to learn the language until I was 29 and my palate was well and truly finished developing, so there are certain phonemes that are never going to sound authentic, but I do get by. I’ve had a lot of compliments on my German, but there is a definite accent that will never entirely disappear. However, when people ask where I’m from originally, their guesses range from America to England to France, so it’s not the strongest possible American accent.
And to answer the original question, as to why I don’t correct my accent: I’m speaking German as well as I already can. The accent comes from my physical limitations in forming sounds that I didn’t make as a very young shantih. Certain things that mark me as a foreigner, such as word choice, smooth out with time and experience, but an American edge will always be there in my pronunciation.
I don’t hear my own accent but I notice that other people don’t have it. Here in Florida I haven’t been able to tell that they have any kind of accent at all. Like I said in another thread, we have to drive into Alabama to hear people talk right. And what is it about the state line that makes people magically start flattening their "i"s and "a"s? :dubious: (Sitting here trying to figure out if I flatten my sounds or if they’re rounder…maybe just soft. Mush-mouthed. Now I’m afraid to talk.)
Oddly enough, your accent comes across 100% in all your posts, even though you don’t seem to be doing it deliberately. I had you pegged with one of the thicker Southern accents.
I’m wondering: did you never go through the phase where you tried to deliberately hide your accent? I’ve always wondered if people with the thicker accents just never felt the pressure to change like us code switchers do.
I can hear my own accent in Norwegian. It’s not particularly American. I’ve managed to overcome most of the problems that Americans have with the language (still working on the retroflex L), but it’s still not quite right. After twenty years, I figure I’ve plateaued, and won’t be improving much more if at all.
I can also hear my Mid-Atlantic accent when speaking English, and I can control it, more or less consciously. When speaking to students or colleagues, I adapt something closer to a Standard American English accent. When speaking to family or American friends, the Pennsylvanian comes out.
At times I can also hear a very slight speech defect - my S sound hisses too much. Not generally noticeable unless I’m speaking into a microphone, but I notice it myself if I happen to say something with lots of S sounds.
I’m certainly aware of my accent in foreign languages. My Mandarin is flat and my tones are off at best, but people understand me well enough to get by and that’s enough for me. I could put the work in to memorizing tones more formally (rather than just kind of faking it on muscle memory) but it’s not really worth it to me right now.
My French accent is horrendous- flat and slow. I ought to be working on that, but all of the French programs I’ve worked with focus on French-from-France, which is not really appropriate for me since I work with west African French. It’d be a lot of work to not really sound like the people I’m actually talking to.
I code switch between a weird American/Australian accent hybrid and a full American accent, depending on who I am talking to.
Interestingly, I can hear the ‘other’ accent. So if I’m talking to my Australian husband, and there’s an American accent on TV, I hear it as accented English. If I’m talking to my mom on the phone and have code switched to American (so not just accent but words - trash and not rubbish, for example) then I hear my husband’s accent if he says something to me.
I can hear myself sometimes, particularly the word “no” which is quite different to both accents. Sometimes I do try to go back to a typical American “no,” because I like my American accent.
I think that’s a great compliment and I appreciate it. Once I heard it said that saying something like “breast of chicken” showed you’re country as much as saying “runnin’” etc. Since I tend to talk like that I thought it was very smart. lol Believe it or not, on here I use my “company voice” so other people will know what I’m talking about. BTW, one of the biggest differences I’ve noticed between talking Southern and talking country is that southerners tend to drop their "r"s. Country people pronounce very strong "r"s, as in “so-and-so is kin to my mother twice removed. So don’t bad mouth him when you’re around 'er.” (I guess we tend to drop our aitches.)
I hear my accent in Spanish and can choose to emphasize it or not; usually I try to speak “newscaster”. If I’m not taking particular care, I swing between several regional/local accents, depending mostly on the company (Cuenco, Ribero, Agoizko, Barcelona Catalan and that newscaster are the common ones - there have been times I was working with Argentinians and had to apologize because their accent was “sticking to me” and someone had taken offense, most realize it’s unintentional and not some sort of mockery). When I was in school, a lot of effort was put into getting everybody to speak “properly”, so there was actually a lot of time spent figuring out which words, emphasis, pronunciations and grammar were regional/local.
I only hear my accent in English when I’m real tired, at which point it becomes a very strong Spanish aksent. At other times I’ve been told I sound “generic American, but not quite from around here”.
