We have had numerous threads about english speaking actors trying to use non-native english accents with various success. Typically Irish, Boston, Southern, Aussie etc, people saying that very few actors have managed to hit the accent right. Basiaclly because they have lived in it their whole lives and subtle differences really stick out.
In not sure if I can explain my question here very well, but I’m wondering about people who arn’t native english speakers recognizing their accent in English. For example, Some one who speaks German, and learned English fluently. Now say an midwestern American actor takes a role which requires speaking English in a German accent as a character that speaks English as a second language. Do you ever notice that the German English accent doesn’t sound like an authentic German-English accent? Do you have to have a super-high level of fluency to catch stuff like that, or is it natural and obvious that you realize the actor is speaking with characteristics that a Native German wouldn’t ever use in English.
It doesn’t really count if you grew up bilingual in English because then it would be natural to you, but for people who studied and learned English in Junior High school or later.
You’ve posed a very specific situation, but speaking more generally, I can certainly recognize when a person speaking French is an anglophone, even if they are as fluent as I am (I am apparently rather easy for a francophone to “read.”)
i don’t think you need to be bi-lingual for that … after spending a couple of months in Germany listening to the way my brother’s friends speak English, i think that i would be comfortable saying whether or not it sounds right.
As an English speaker who speaks Spanish as a second language, I think I could pretty easily detect a Spanish speaker pretending it be an English speaker speaking Spanish with an English accent.
Hollywood fake french accents generally sounds exactly like that…hollywood fake french acccents. They often add on top on this a specific tone of voice (think snooty french waiter) which is nowhere to be found outside english-speaking movies.
By the way, when people actually speak french in a movie, you can get anything. Generally, approximative french spoken with a heavy american accent (one character at the beginning of “We were soldiers” that I watched yesterday, for instance), but sometimes perfect french (the other character in the same movie), and sometimes completely unintelligible french that needs to be subtitled (the scene where they speak french in “The last of the Mohicans”, for instance).
A pet peeve of mine are characters who supposedly don’t speak a good english, which results in them not being able to say or understand the most basic sentences (say, “thank you”) but are perfectly able to express and understand complicated stuff. Just yesterday, for instance, in some american serie, a character needed a translator when they asked her basic questions but didn’t need him anymore when the plot became more convoluted. Worst are characters who have long lines in english, but then revert to “Si, señor” mode. Even wost are non native english speakers speaking to others non-native english speakers, of course in english but doing the same, mixing a couple spanish/french/german words in an otherwise 100% english conversation.