Here in the US I have met people who learned English as their 2nd language but have no accent at all. They were born outside the US. They were from Russia, Germany and Colombia.
I am curious how they do this when it seems that everybody else speaks English with an accent if they have another language as their first.
Nobody speaks English without an accent. Do you mean without a hint of their native language?
The only person I’ve known who approached that was brought up in a bi-lingual family, but there were still hints of French in some of her pronunciation.
Bijou, is American English your first language? Did you grow up in America?
Most people I know whose primary language is not English will retain some tell-tale traces. Some people pick up accents more than others.
I can tell you English is a second language for me and I speak it with a very neutral American accent. Nobody asks me if I am not American. I have always made a point of picking up the local accent. Most people stop trying once they can communicate.
I can, off the top of my head, think of three people that I see a few times a week whose English is their second language, and who speak English completely without accent (actually, one of them has an accent, but it’s a regional American accent, which I don’t think is what the OP means). And plenty of people I’ve met over the years.
One is my stepmother. She wasn’t exposed to English until she started the first grade in public school, in the Bronx, New York. Her parents were recent immigrants to the US, didn’t speak a word of English, and lived in a community in which one could get by without English.
Another is a friend. More of a friend of a friend, I guess. Born in Germany. Lived all over the world growing up. Speaks flawless English, but it wasn’t his first language.
Another spoke French as his first language. Didn’t learn English until he arrived (from Belgium) in the US as a very young child. Learned English in first grade, like my stepmother.
I also grew up with plenty of people who spoke Spanish at home and didn’t learn English until they started school (although they were probably exposed to English-language television and radio). Not that unusual here in New York. None of them had perceptible accents (other than New York accents).
The common denominator for all three, obviously, is that they learned English at a very young age.
Some people just have a natural knack for languages. Some foreign accents are less noticeable than others. And actors will often specifically train to take on the accent they want. It’s a skill like any other, and you can get better at it if that’s a priority of yours.
My sister was born in Europe and learned three language prior to coming to the US when my parents immigrated. She was 6. She has no trace of her previous accents now.
I don’t have a cite for this, but I think it depends how old they were when they came here. The cut-off point seems to be puberty. If a child comes here prior to puberty, he learns English without an accent. Post-puberty, he retains his accent for the remainder of his life.
I was born in India, learnt some English there along with Hindi up till age ~7 and then came over the UK. I remember having a relatively distinctive accent for a few years, but I think that was more to do with the people I was around. After we had moved around a bit and I started to live with just my mum, my accent vanished and now people are pretty surprised to hear that I’m not native English.
bascially I think your accent depends on your parents and the people you hang arounds’ accents
My father didn’t learn English till he started school. His parents spoke little English and Yiddish was his mother tongue and the entire South Philly neighborhood he grew up was Yiddish speaking. But as an adult, he had only the South Philly accent.
I met a Hungarian who had come to England as an adult and spoke English with not a trace of Hungarian accent. His wife spoke with a heavy Hungarian accent. Of course, he spoke with an English accent. I knew a Danish woman who married an Englishman and had not a trace of Danish accent. A former chair of my department came to the US from Germany as a student and married an American and I never would have imagined he was not native. Then he divorced and married a German and then a very light German accent began to appear. Finally, I met an American who was the proprietress (along with her husband) of a cafe near Bern in Switzerland. When she heard us speaking English with our Swiss friends, she came over and started talking to us. She explained that she come to Switzerland as a young woman and gotten a job in the very same cafe, married the son of the owner and settled. At the end she had a conversation in Swiss German with our friends and they said they could not have imagined she wasn’t native Swiss. (Although she had a Bernese accent.)
So, while uncommon, it is not as rare as you might think that even an adult can come to speak a foreign language with no discernible accent.
It is also not impossible to lose your native language. I have a colleague who left Germany at age 16. He does have a slight accent speaking English. But I was astonished to hear him speaking English with a German visitor. I asked him about it after and he said that he really hadn’t been speaking German for well over 50 years and didn’t feel comfortable with it any more. (Also he never learned the technical vocabulary needed to have this kind of discussion in German.)
My major professor was Czech and had grown up in various countries in Europe in the aftermath of WWII. He spoke English without a noticeable accent. He must have learned British accented English first but didn’t sound particularly British. (He once asked me if I could detect an accent and I told him the only thing that might give it him away was that he spoke English better than most native speakers.;)) He was also fluent in French, which he spoke at home with his French-Swiss wife, although I can’t vouch for his accent, and also spoke decent German and Spanish.
One of my friends here in Panama is British and came to Panama in his 20s. I am told by Panamanians that he speaks virtually flawless Panamanian Spanish.
My wife is a native Spanish speaker who knew no English when she came to the States in her teens. Since then her native accent has all but disappeared. I say “all but” because I don’t hear it at all, but people who meet her for the first time say they detect it, although they cannot place it.
This is ancedotal, but Danish people seem to be able to speak English with flawless/near-flawless North-West English accents:
Jan Molby is a well-known Danish soccer player who arrived in England aged 21 (after a two-year stint in the Netherlands), but he speaks English with a flawless scouse (Liverpool) accent. To hear him speak you would never guess that he wasn’t born and raised outside of the Liverpool area, much less that he didn’t even start living in England until he was an adult. Here’s a video of him speaking: Jan Molby - Glenrothes CC Sportsmans Dinner Feb 2013 - YouTube
Similarly Peter Schmeichel, Danish goalkeeper who is regarded by many as the best goalkeeper in the history of soccer, came over from Denmark to England aged 27 and he speaks English with a near-perfect Mancunian (Manchester) accent. His accent is pretty much flawless, but sometimes he gives away that he isn’t speaking his mother tongue when he trips over words. Here’s an interview with him: World Sport TV - Peter Schmeichel Interview - YouTube
I grew up in the US and only speak English.
One of the people I mentioned learned English at age 18, she is Russian. She came here at 18 and knew no English at all.
My mother and SO work in research into second language acquisition,* and in short: no, not really. There used to be these kinds of ideas, up until about the '80s. They also used to think children would become confused and mute if they learned different languages.
My papa was a young teenager when he moved to the UK, and he has no accent.
Sometimes the age of around 8 is still mentioned. You could set up some very specific guidelines for what you are looking for and how you define terms, and then look at the statistics, but you still only get numbers saying a certain amount of people will learn a language to a certain degree of fluency that you have defined, with an accent that can or cannot be detected by certain people etc etc. Brains differ, exposure differs, previous languages differ, teaching differs. You get nothing close to “no more fluency after puberty”. So sometimes you hear the age of 8 being used as a cut-off for really easily picking up a language and coming out fluent. Whatever that means.
Even measuring an accent is pretty subjective. As an actor I’ve had voice & accent coaches who say I have an English accent or a Rotterdam accent when I speak Dutch (and others who say neutral accent). The funny thing is, they both have an “ow” sound. I can just not do that, and then suddenly I have neither of those accents. What do we now know about my accent? Am I fluent, or not? Do I have a foreign accent or not?
Bear in mind that multilingualism is the norm, not the exception. Suddenly, it’s not so strange that people can learn languages pretty well. Some people have more musical hearing and more flexible tongues and they just imitate better, age is not really the only, or necessarily the biggest, deciding factor.
In my (extensive) experience meeting people for whom English is not their native tongue (and who are not Danes), the rule of thumb is: if they were immersed in English when they were 14-15yo and younger, there is no accent. Anything above - accent, from slight to heavy. I came to the US at 16 - slight accent (although who knows, maybe it came from my years in Israel). My wife came at 11yo - no accent. My brother at 10 - no accent.
Yes, age when learning the language is a very important factor. Learning as a child or youngster (like I did) means it is easy to acquire native accent. BUT, accepting it is more difficult to acquire native accent as an adult, and accepting that it is more difficult for some persons than for others, I would say a huge part, the biggest part, is that adults stop trying to improve their accent once they can communicate (or they think they can). I have told several people that they would do well to improve their accents because a bad accent is a limitation which affects them in their proffesional life. They know it, I have told them… they don’t do it. it’s like golf, if you learn it worng it is more difficult to get it right but it can be done. Practice, practice, practice. You will get better at it. But people do not care and do not do it.
I have no doubt most people could do much better if they just tried.
I have know adults who have changed their accent in their native language for different reasons. Some accents in Spanish, like in English, denote low(er) social class. Some people decide to change it and they can.
I remember reading the memoirs of a linguist, possibly Mario Pei. He learned German as an adult and used his knowledge of phonetics and phonology to speak with a native accent. He was so successful that Germans often assumed he was a native too. Unfortunately his knowledge of German grammar, vocabulary, and folkways lagged behind his pronunciation, and they all thought he was a German idiot. He started speaking with an accent so they would know he was a foreigner and give him more leeway.
The barber I usually go to is a delightful lady, born in Mexico to Mexican parents. They brought her here at a relatively early age, and immediately hired an English tutor.
She has no sign of an Hispanic accent, but, as her tutor was from NYC, does have just a trace of a traditional New York accent. Quite striking.
A good friend of mine just became a U.S. citizen.
When she went to her swearing in ceremony (I don’t know if it’s called that), she chatted a bit with the parking attendent who, because of the nature of the event, had been greeting many new citizens from countries around the world.
He asked her what country she is from. She replied that she is from Ireland.
“Oh!” he replied “Well, you speak very good English!”
:smack:
In my experience, I agree with this. Early age helps a lot, but it’s not completely necessary. I’ve met a couple of people who have learned English past their teenage years and I wouldn’t be able to tell they weren’t native. And I have a good friend who is English (as in from England), who learned Hungarian at around the age of 20 or so living in Hungary, and the natives swear he’s a local–the only accent they detect is an Eastern Hungarian accent–which is exactly where he learned the language. That’s that only other language he speaks.
Now, I admit, this is not the common case, but it is possible even if you don’t learn the language at a very early age.