It takes practice. Actors learn and master accents all the time, and this is within a single language where you don’t have the advantage of switching context.
What you’re basically saying is that human beings past the age x lose the ability to learn the difference between sounds, learn to pronounce new sounds and learn new rytms, which is patently untrue. Learning and understanding the structure of a language is the hard part, pronouncing it in a certain way is just a question of instruction and practice.
I think kids in Sweden, as in a lot of countries, are taught English beginning at a young age. So she may speak English pretty clearly.
Never having heard her speak, or really thought or cared much about the whole stupid scandal, it was pretty hilarious to hear her on South Park talking all “skurney verny hushka verney” while screaming at stupid Tiger!
My brother spent 6 months in Sweden 30 years ago. He said all the people under 30 knew English but above that age it was less well known. By now a lot more people should know English.
As a fellow Scandinavian, I’d say it’s entirely possible she has a strong American accent - many of us do. Schools teach Standard English, but allow American English spelling and pronunciation. From a young age we’re constantly exposed to English spoken in a variety of accents by native speakers. TV and movies are only dubbed when aimed at the youngest viewers, so we grow up watching a lot of subtitled American and British TV. Many people find the American pronunciation easier to copy, it’s lazier and less precise, and we probably hear more of it.
When I moved to the UK (as an adult), I spoke Standard English without an obvious foreign accent. I now have a strong regional accent, one I’d had little exposure to before living here.
Is that “long E” as English speakers usually understand it, like in “green” and “reed”? Or is it a true E like in the German word streben?
Phonologists would call that long i, or /i:/ and American phonologists are no exception. But most of us are told in primary school that the “long” form of a vowel is the one that sounds the same as the letter’s name, when reciting the alphabet.
I am not a linguist though a member of my family is. It is possible to lose an accent through effort and instruction. Outside of actors and tv news anchors, very few people actually put the work in to do this. I have no direct knowledge as to whether Elin has done so.
There are sounds in certain languages which people who speak languages that do not have those sounds lose the ability to speak and the ability to hear. There are phonemes that English has but Swedish does not, but I do not know whether Swedish people lose the ability to speak those particular phonemes.
You know, if you’re trying to give pronunciation examples to English-speaking/reading audiences, using English examples would be better than German ones.
(Streben - is that streh-ben or stree-been or what?)
I’d say that it’s even more so the other way round and Swede’s speaking English have, as has been pointed out, the benefit of an early start as opposed to English speakers that have learned Swedish, meaning we generally have a much better pronunciation, with or without a noticeable accent.
Then of course there are phonemes that we are never taught at school as they are very dialectal, but that we have no problem with at all as you (British you, that is) have inherited from us, such as the sound you can find in Scottish dialects in words like “cow”, “house”, “now” (often spelled coo, hoos, noo), not to mention the place name Stenhousemuir, which is the long variant of a sound I have come across in the word “pub” when spoken by a person from the Midlands.
It’s hard to explain how a sound is pronounced when the other person can’t hear you say it. I was taught to say words like “here”, “near” etc in one way, with a rather “sharp” sound, like German die, but over the years I have realised that the actual pronunciation is more open with the chin further down and the mouth a bit more open.
If you by eh mean the short “e” sound in the beginning of a word like “echo” then that’s not it. This is a long sound, perhaps the one you mean by “ee”, and you push the middle of your tongue forwards in you mouth while the tip of it remains in the same position (it feels like that anyway when I mouth the sounds to myself).
(I know I wrote the pronunciations the other way round earlier. Just blame it on I have given a thought or so about what English speakers really mean by the different spellings.)
BTW the combination “st” in German is pronounced “sh” (just to confuse things).
Long E in German (and pretty much every other language but English) is quite close to what we call long A, but without the little y sound at the end. It is hard to explain, as there’s no one word in English that even all Americans use the German sound.
The best I can come up with is if your dialect does not pronounce air and err the same, and air does not sound like it could almost be two syllables, then that’s the sound, without the r.
If I had to pick a word closest to the lady’s name, I’d pick ailin’ (you know, ailing, but without the g.) If I were transcribing it, I’d write A-lynn.