I don’t necessarily hear my accent in fluent speech, because, well, that would defeat the purpose. Am I otherwise tangentally aware? Totally.
I speak 7 languages:
In English, my accent is RP with no regional accent. I can put on different accents, with varying degrees of success.
In Dutch I have virtually no accent (the Dutch equivalent of RP: ABN), the only people ever to have discerned an accent were 3 vocal coaches. I can completely eliminate the English sounds if I try (it’s mainly the “o”, “t” and “s”, not traditionally the sounds an English person would struggle with.) I can put on many accents, more successfully than in English for some reason.
In Portuguese I have a strong Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) accent, and though I might fool someone for a minute (especially someone from Portugal) they can easily tell I am foreign. I can put on 2 accents, badly.
In Spanish I have a Portuguese accent. I can clearly hear it, but speaking conversationally I can’t do anything about it. I can imitate the sounds just fine if I try though, I would probably improve with some time.
In German and French I don’t have any particular accent, but I sound foreign. Both improve significantly if I’m exposed to the language for some time. With these two, I cannot hear the actual sounds I am doing wrong, I just get better at imitating with regular practice.
My Romanian is not really good enough to be sure how I sound.
First comes being able to imitate a certain sound that might not exist in your native/first language. In Dutch the many diphthongs (esp. “eu” and “ui”) and the hard “g” present difficulties to most learners. In English the “th”, in Portuguese the nasal “ão”. I can pronounce all these sounds without any problems and speak the three languages fluently. And yet there will be something about the way I sound that will give me away. Our ears are so specifically tuned to the way people speak, and I think we probably take more information than we think accents.
I have heard my voice recorded a lot (in different languages and different accents) and it has not made me more or less aware of the way I speak, I can hear what I sound like while I’m speaking. Doing something about it though, is a different matter. It is like learning grammar, up to a point. First you keep doing it wrong and you don’t know, then you’re doing it wrong and you know and then you can start to change.
I respectfully, and without cites, disagree. When I taught linguistics at University of Paris (not my forte, but I learned some stuff on my off-time and on the job), and when I got to be friends with a number of professional linguists, it was evident that mastering intonation (kind of like an accent, if you like – at least an important part of an accent), was a skill like many others. Much practice required, and some (I still can’t trill my ‘r’ sounds) may never be mastered, but accents are very much IME comparable to other areas of competence. Difficult, perhaps, to get right, but not impossible and certainly not “burying the needle” kind of difficulty.
Well, yes, you can, with proper linguistic coaching, learn another accent. But that’s not what I was talking about. I was referring to just hearing that your accent is wrong and just inherently being able to change it, as the OP seems to assume is possible. My point is that it’s not that easy.
I’m sure I could learn a proper accent from a linguistics coach, but it’s never been that important. When I do need to speak Spanish, I mostly just don’t change my accent at all, and that’s good enough for what little communication I do. But when I was learning, I did try to acquire one on my own, and I was a complete failure when I consciously tried. I did better after listening to a ton of native Spanish. But, like I said, it’s not that important to me now, so I don’t bother.
'sok - I have yet to meet a non-native-Russian speaker (including professors of Russian in college) who spoke Russian with no accent 
I can’t hear my own accent in English although I am told I have a slight one. I can hear it in Hebrew, sometimes.
The more nervous I am when I’m speaking English, the stronger my Canadian French accent gets. When it’s strong I can definitely hear it, though it may be more that I realise that my mouth doesn’t move the way it should. But there are other times when I think I sound like a native English speaker (probably Canadian). I have been mistaken for a native speaker before, but I cannot remember if it was by other native speakers. Now I’m curious to know how my accent is perceived.
ETA: I also hear my accent in Italian, but I’m currently learning that. I think I could manage to speak it without any “placeable” foreign accent relatively soon, but I guess natives would at least recognize me as not one of their own.
My Russian professor (from Russia) opened the very first class by saying we should never be ashamed of our native accents showing when we spoke Russian, because they only identify us as people bright enough to learn to speak Russian as a second language.
Japanese pronunciation is relatively easy for English speakers, but I have trouble listening to myself speak a concentrated block of Japanese because I don’t have the vocab/grammar for it. I get out short phrases/sentences, but I know that I pause way more than native speakers do because I’m always thinking of what to say next. So I guess it’s more a problem of intonation than pronunciation, which isn’t really a problem I can correct right now.
In French, on the other hand, the r is different enough that without some concentrated effort for a long period of time (like doing speech therapy for months, for example), I’ll never be able to get it down. I gave it my best shot, but there are more important things when learning a language than to be able to perfectly mimic the accent. It’d certainly be a bonus (and cool), but how many hours do you want to spend on diction when you could be learning new vocab and grammatical structures instead?
I moved from Western Canada to Ontario and now I catch myself saying “aboot” (or “aboat” or whatever) from time to time. How humiliating.
I think one problem for non-native speakers can be that they often do not have a clear regional accent, which makes it sound “strange”. I went to international school, and can easily tell from the way another person speaks that they are (ex-)international school students. Their English is usually perfect, but they mix different accents and even different regional idioms. They might say “cab” (instead of taxi), but “zip” (not zipper). Every word they pronounce is correct somewhere in the world and the intonation is also flawless. But there is just something… same with me to some extent, I suppose…
I can clearly hear my accent when speaking Spanish and it drives me crazy. It has gotten a bit less pronounced over time, but it’s still there. I feel like my speech is too dull and heavy when speaking Spanish, having been carried over from American English. I don’t worry about it too much though as long as the accent doesn’t impede understanding, and many native Spanish speakers have assured me that it doesn’t (not nearly as much as my habit of using completely wrong words!).
Yeah, I have a hick accent from west central Illinois. The area was settled by a lot of folks from Kentucky and Tennessee years ago, so pockets of this area still have a pretty strong twang. I can keep it down when I try, but I generally try to only in certain situations. As for the rest of the time, I’ll just say this- I can do a pretty good Larry the Cable Guy impression just by making my voice a little raspier and using worse grammar.
No. I don’t have one. My speech is impeccable.
Because when it’s strong enough for both me and non-linguists who don’t know beforehand I’m a foreigner to hear it, either I haven’t been speaking English/Catalan on a regular basis for way too long, or I’m way too tired.
Once I’ve got enough recent practice and if I’m not semicomatose, I get (mis)taken for middle-of-the-country American in English and for Barcelonina in Catalan (which makes sense, as all my Catalan relatives are from Barcelona and between family visits and college I lived there for a long time). Nowadays, and after 2 years in Scotland, I figure I’d need a bit more time than on prior occasions to move back from those mixed regional accents gracer mentions to my usual American; what I’ve never had is any kind of unmixed British accent, something which drove my teachers crazy (they were trying to teach us “Her Majesty’s English” and somehow I already managed to sound American without ever having set foot in the country).
Apparently one of the first things that goes off in English is my J and Y, as well as my “th group”, but this last problem is so frequent that most people don’t even register it.
I can’t really speak for myself too much since I live in the same area I was risen, though because there’s a lot of people moving into this area people have commented on some regional things I say. Some of them will come and go, some of them stay, and some I’ve changed because I decided I didn’t like them and I notice it when I’m paying attention to it, otherwise I really don’t care.
That said, I was once engaged to a girl from Bulgaria who had a fairly strong accent and seemed surprised when it would come up that she had an accent. But I think that’s largely a case that some sounds simply don’t exist in some languages (like the infamous L/R example for Chinese accents) and so they just end up using the closest sound from their language and thus is sounds the same or similar to them but clearly off to a native speaker. At least, that’s my best guess at explaining it.
When I lived in Mississippi, people used to tell me that they knew when I spoke to my family in New York and New Jersey because my accent got stronger.
I have a mixed accent, I am told…Northern New Jersey, Orange County New York, Jackson, Mississippi, NY again, and now Florida.
I do use a little bit of a drawl when I am trying to wheedle some information out of an insurance company rep…usually works every time…seems that the men just adore being gushed at that they are so smart and just so helpful…
Nope, but others do…
I can certainly hear my own, but only if I am reading aloud. Now, most people where I reside (Texas) have a thick Southern accent, but I have more of a New England/Canadian accent (for some unknown reason. On multiple occasions, my family and friends, and even my girlfriend who has a similar accent (she lives in Michigan) have pointed out to me that I have an odd Northern accent, and that it is highly peculiar that I don’t have a southern accent (because the rest of my family has extremely thick accents). So yes, it is quite possible for one to distinguish their own accent, but only in contrast to another.
I don’t hear it when I speak. I’m often embarrassed when I hear a recording of myself. I sound SOOOO Southern.
I can see that this thread started in 2011, but I didn’t answer it then so here it goes.
Yes, I can. My first language is Spanish, then I learned German at age 5 and spoke it for 3-4 years. When my step-mom (she’s German) and my father split up, he never spoke to me in German again. I forgot it, all of it. When I was 12 I learned English in Toronto.
I know the words that I struggle to say correctly in English, or that I say with an “accent,” which frankly I’m not quite sure I know where it’s from because I’ve lived in various countries and many states here in the USA. I also tend to make up words.
I used to call a spigot a spricket…:smack: