What about those who, rather than just naturally assimilating into life in another country, make a conscious, formal effort to learn a foreign language as an adult as “correctly” as possible, with competent professional instruction - say someone in the diplomatic corps being prepared for a new assignment, or someone who decides later in life to become a scholar of a foreign language and literature - are they all doomed to being forever marked by a strong accent?
No, they’re not all doomed. I think part of the point most people are making here is that skill varies. The earlier in life you begin practicing multilingualism, the more likely you’ll be able to work on reducing your accent in another language.
The number of people who will be able to completely eliminate any traces of a foreign accent in such circumstances will be rare however.
The more time and effort you spend training, of course, the better you’ll be. Actors and other professional entertainers have been known to change their own accents – look at people like Ted Koppel, Pierce Brosnan, John Mahoney, and Portia de Rossi. Of course the latter three in that group all claim that they have completely lost their original Irish, English, and Australian accents, respectively.
This is still anecdotal, but absolutely native speakers of distant languages have come to, for example, the US and shed all but the faintest traces of their initial accents, and can even do surprisingly good parlor tricks by replicating, say, an Alsatian-French accent or a Bath UK accent to very good effect. The ones I’ve known personally had training in linguistics as well as whatever else they did, though.
It also varies enormously by which languages they previously knew and which the new language is. How different are the phonetics, the grammar, the intonation? More different -> harder. Going from Greek to English, drastic_quench’s teacher was dealing with different phonetics, different intonations, a language which has very few Greek roots (and those usually in highly-technical language) and different grammar; going from Greek to Spanish mean similar phonetics, similar intonations*, more Greek roots than people realize (and in daily language)… oh yeah, different grammar.
For someone who already speaks two romance languages, a third one won’t be too difficult to add to the mix; the worst difficulty can come from keeping them apart (I’ve got that problem occasionally with French, I think “no, it can’t be that way, that’s how it is in Catalan…” and it turns out to be the same way in French). But adding, say, Russian to French and Italian won’t be much easier (although it will be easier, since you already have the basic “multiple languages pack”) than adding it to French alone.
- Italian and Spanish have similar vocabulary but different intonations, a different “song under the words”; Greek and Spanish have less-similar vocabulary but the intonations/phonetics combo always gets a double-take from me until I realize it’s Greek, not Spanish.
Nava, that reminds me, when I was in Greece I overheard some Greek rap on the radio. I was impressed with how Greek rap has a rapid-fire delivery similar to Spanish rap. French language rap on the other hand… argh! (Of course, the best rap is in English. Everyone knows that).
Even with my spotty grasp of French, I can puzzle out simple sentences in other Romance languages. I was very impressed the other day when I looked over some Romanian lyrics and could figure out the gist of the song!
Just had a long coffee with a language instructor friend who backs up much of what has been said in this thread. To summarize what he said…
Early exposure to multiple languages (not just different English accents) is very important. Up to about age 12, you can form the neural connections that allow you to hear a sound. If you miss that, there are sounds in other languages that you simply will never hear without special training (for example, your German buddy will probably say ‘zee’ instead of ‘the’ - because they simply cannot hear ‘th’ - a sound that does not exist in German.)
In addition to sounds, other components of a ‘foreign’ accent are intonation, stress and rhythm of speaking. Mastering all of those in addition to just the words and grammar takes more effort that most will put into learning a language. After all, learning just the words to say “Throw poppa down the stairs his hat.” in a heavy German accent will be understood without mastering grammar and the rest.
Without the exposure to multiple languages in childhood, it is quite challenging to lose and accent. It can be done, I knew a German businessman who worked for years to learn accent-less American English, but it was hard and took professional instruction.
Another American friend attributes a large part of his native French ability to toddler years exposure to Japanese even though he did not speak Japanese. He could however recognize uniquely Japanese sounds, which facilitated hearing the uniquely French sounds.
While it’s easier to learn languages in young age, I think you’re overstating the case here. I didn’t speak very much English at age 12, but I have no problem hearing and pronouncing [ð] and [θ], the two sounds transcribed in English as ‘th’. None of them exist in French, my native language. With enough exposure to a language, you can acquire its sounds.
I don’t think there’s an overstatement. I think the point is that being exposed to any different phonemic inventory at a young age helps wire your brain tone flexible in perceiving any new phonemic inventory at a later age.
There will exceptions of course but in willing to guess that even if you had no exposure to English specifically that you did have exposure to languages other than your own.
And furthermore even among those who have this kind of experience, it’s still difficult to be completely native accent-wise in a new language. There are plenty of native French speakers who can’t properly distinguish those phones.
Yep. There was an intriguing NYT article on this just recently.