In college, I learned a foreign language - badly. Even if you speak French, you’d have no problem determining that I speak Spanish horribly.
I would guess that one of the key factors in giving my away, besides my lack of a large spanish vocabulary, would be my horrid accent. To learn a third language or more, seems completely impossible for me.
Yet, there are people who know 4,5 6 or more languages. Certainly, these people grasp something about languages that I do not.
My question is, since these people have this gift, to they tend to speak languages with less “accent” than I or average person would? Is there some way that they are hearing language that is so differnt, that they can pick it up without an accent?
Not sure that this quite answers your question, but many expats seem to become “accentless” - living abroad surrounded by people of different languages, maybe even speaking them, your national accent can dilute.
I have also noticed almost a “sing-song” english accent among long-time expats from here in the Middle East, and people from Singapore. I think I’ve even noticed myself doing it, when I’m trying to make myself understood to a person with poor english. I don’t know where it comes from or why the hell I’m doing it though, it’s not deliberate.
Among bilingual/multi-lingual colleages: one girl is split-fluent English and Arabic. She has a touch of Arabic in her normal English accent (was British public school educated) but is otherwise quite clipped and British sounding. When I hear her talking on the phone to an Arabic friend in English, her English accent gets way more Arabic, really quite heavily accented.
Another girl is fluent Canadian english and fluent conversational (not formal) Arabic. Has a totally Canadian accent as far as I can tell, very very heavy. And seems to have the same heavy Canadian accent when she speaks Arabic.
From experience, people with good foreign language accents have either been taught well, live among native speakers, or have a really good ear for it. I am not sure the ability to learn language is exactly equal to the ability to have a perfect accent.
Gotta second istara on this one. I’ve recently begun teaching myself Latin American Spanish and was trying to converse over the phone with a Guatemalan acquaintance while over at a friend’s house. My friend made it all the more difficult by laughing uncontrollably the whole time. Finally when I hung up he apologized and said “My grandparents were from Russia, and you sounded like my grandfather trying to speak Spanish.”
So apparently I speak Spanish with a Russian accent. Hardly surprising, I suppose, since I’ve studied Russian actively for a lot longer than any other language I’ve tackled.
That’s not the first time it’s happened, either. Most of the Russians I met in passing thought I was Estonian, and Italians thought I was Czech. I don’t know how common this sort of accent mixing is, but I’d assume it’s fairly common among polyglots.
I heard Gary Kasparov (in addition to playing chess, he’s also a polyglot) speak once (in English), and it sounded to me like he had a French accent. Then again, I’m not sure I would have recognized a Russian accent had I heard one.
I haven’t entirely figured it out, but some people do have a better “ear” for languages and/or accents. My parents were both born and raised in New Jersey, and all of their parents have (or had) strong South Jersey accents; we moved to the Midwest when I was a baby, and my dad moved back to NY in 1985, when I was in high school.
My dad has a “neutral” American accent, but my mom still has a strong Jersey accent, although oddly enough Mom was the only one of the two who can even function in a foreign language, so you’d think she’d be more sensitive. My younger sister and I have “neutral” American accents, but if we’re in NJ or around family members, we pick up their inflections very quickly. Mom’s parents both speak pidgin French from many years of doing business in France, but nobody would mistake them for French.
Spanish was my first foreign language, and sometimes people mistake me for a native speaker. Some French came later, and although I was never fluent, people don’t always take me for an American (I guess I have an accent which nobody can quite place; maybe it’s the Spanish influence). Russian came later; I’m pretty fluent, and when I was studying in Russia and right after I came back, people took me either for a North Caucasian (that’s who I was hanging out with), or someone with Russian-speaking parents who had come to the U.S. as a kid. One drunken Russian woman who was wandering around Leningrad on the anniversary of the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution refused to believe that I was American, insisting that I was merely a “domestic” hard-currency hooker who was afecting an accent to seem more sophisticated and therefore demand higher prices for my services.
My college roomie was born in EL Salvador and came to Long Island at the age of 11; she used to have a Long Island Salvadoran accent, but she’s now living in England with her English husband, and has a Long Island Salvadoran accent with British vocabulary and intonation. Very bizarre. I wonder how her kids will turn out!
In sum, who the heck knows how it works? I have a few iedas, but nothing definitive beyond saying that when people learn foreign languages, their pronunciation/intonation is frequently affected by the languages they have learned previously, and may be affected by their desire to learn new languages.
I’m not completely sure I understand the question – are you asking whether people whose foreign language learning abilities are generally strong also tend to be good at picking up accents? At least in my case, the answer is no. I’m quite good at learning foreign vocab and grammar, but sounds and accents completely elude me. I don’t hear them very well, and I can’t imitate sounds that have no close equivalent in English. My Spanish is good enough for advanced academic work, but I still speak it with a painfully thick American accent, and probably always will.
BTW, there is nothing mystical about the ability to learn another language – virtually every immigrant does it, regardless of education or innate ability. The key is intensive practice; four hours a week in a classroom is NOT enough, and immersion is ideal.
I worked once as a diswasher in Bern, Switzerland where a good portion of my job discription was translation. The chefs were German, the waiters French, and the rest of the dishwashers were Spanish (working illegally, but so was I so…). None of the dishwashers spoke anything but Spanish. They claimed I spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent (probably true, I learned it on the streets of different towns and cities in the southwest U.S.).
There were two chefs who spoke English - none of the chefs would admit to speaking any French. All of the waiters claimed to know no language other than French (Yet we had an international clientel that they waited on daily - but I was brought out when a Latin American or Spainard came in and needed something). So I tried to communicate in French with the waiters, English with the Chefs, and Spanish with the dishwashers.
The waiters claimed my French wasn’t good enough to have an accent, then one conceded that maybe it sounded a little like the French of a person with the Spanish accent of an illiterate peasant (I have always loved the French).
One of the basic building blocks of language is the phoneme and the phonological constructs thereof. Think of a phoneme as the smallest sound you use in speech. Each language has a set of phonemes used to construct it’s sounds and words. There is often some intersection of the phoneme sets used in some languages, some languages overlap more than others, etc. To be able to reproduce a language you must either be able to hear and reproduce these phonemes or synthesize the phonemes in a new language by utilizing the phonemes in your native language. Exposure to multiple languages, especially at a young age, facilitates the ability to learn further languages, because one adds the phonemes from these languages to their phoneme list.
One interesting theory was that learning disabilities in a person’s base language predicted a difficulty to learn other languages because the learning disability could hinge on a phonological defect in the base language.
I can support some of this with cites, but it will be a lot of work to do so, therefore I’ll wait to see if anyone comes along with a better documented explanation.
One of the basic building blocks of language is the phoneme and the phonological constructs thereof. Think of a phoneme as the smallest sound you use in speech. Each language has a set of phonemes used to construct it’s sounds and words. There is often some intersection of the phoneme sets used in some languages, some languages overlap more than others, etc. To be able to reproduce a language you must either be able to hear and reproduce these phonemes or synthesize the phonemes in a new language by utilizing the phonemes in your native language. Exposure to multiple languages, especially at a young age, facilitates the ability to learn further languages, because one adds the phonemes from these languages to their phoneme list.
One interesting theory was that learning disabilities in a person’s base language predicted a difficulty to learn other languages because the learning disability could hinge on a phonological defect in the base language.
I can support some of this with cites, but it will be a lot of work to do so, therefore I’ll wait to see if anyone comes along with a better documented explanation.
We do speak with less accents, but as been pointed out the accents cross over. I know this from myself and from most of my acquaintances who are fluent multilingual. In order of command I speak: American English with a barely audible Scandinavian twang, Swedish with a mild American roll, French with a faint Swedish singsong and German with a strong Swedish AND French accent while my Danish and Norwegian are pretty Swedish in nature. As I have moved around the world the level and pitch has shifted various times in each language. Still stranger is that we tend to mix up the syntax between languages, but not the ‘I use the syntax of my native tongue way’ that people who learnt the languages formally or as adults do. Nope, I borrow and lend freely between them all leading to a somewhat convoluted language in all three of my birth languages. Obviously one also tends to transfer words at a pretty disheartening rate for anyone who doesn’t speak the same tongues.
As it would be it seems that the capacity to learn languages fluently fairly easily is a remnant of infant days. I’ve read that all infants can discern words from just syllables far better than adults. This is a necessity in learning to speak. As it would seem we retain this capacity if regularly exposed to varied languages in our early years. I do retain the ability to learn languages in as much as that I just picked up my fourth fully fluent language, German (I don’t count the Scandinavian tongues - that’s cheating). When I read about it I tested the word syllable thing on myself and indeed; I can most often count the words in any foreign language sentence to a reasonably accurate degree, while monolinguals or adult multilinguals that I tested against have a hard time at it.
This makes it a lot easier to learn a new language by ear only. As a matter of fact I am glad that it is so, because I couldn’t learn a new language formally if you forced me since I am both dyslexic and have a command of formal grammar that would make a preschooler look bright.
No. This is specifically missing the point. The question does not concern people who learn one additional language. The question is about those who know 4 or more languages. You speak Spanish with a painfully think accent. Come back when you pick up 3 or 4 additional languages.
I’d argue that for you (like me) picking up those 3 or 4 additional languages would be exceedingly difficult, and you’ll have a heavy accent in all of them, if you can even do it.
I think ShibbOleth & Sparc are on the right track here. I’ll bet that for people that languages come easy to, they were exposed to multiple languages (greater than 2) when they were young.
I’d further speculate that after you learn 4 or more at a young age, learning a few more at later in life in much easier (prehaps incredibly easy), and becuase you head is more conscious of phonemes nuances, and foreign syllables - your accent is significantly less pronouced.
Well, it’s 3am, so I am not terribly confident on my writing skills, but here’s another attempt to explain it:
The smallest sound unit of language which people are conciously aware of (for your native lanaguage(s)) is the phoneme. In English, a few of such sounds would be /p/, /t/, and /k/ - we can tell the difference between pad and tad, and between pat and cat.
But what English speakers without linguistic training don’t realize is that the /p/ in pie and the /p/ in spy are actually two different sounds. The one in pie is aspirated (has a “puff of air” after it) and the one in “spy” is not. But as English speakers, we really can’t tell the difference (unless trained to).
The only reason this is relevant to accent is that in many other languages (such as French), /p/ is pronounced as in spy, whereas in English, the /p/ in pie is the default. So when I speak French I’m (almost always) saying an English /p/ – unless I’ve figured out how to make the other one, which is pretty hard for most people. And therefore I have an accent.
Then there are langauges such as Hindi, where the two /p/s acutally distingush two separate words, such that instead of just sounding a little different, you can actually say a different word than you intended. (According to one of my linguistics textbooks: /pel/, with the /p/ from pie means “fruit,” whereas with the /p/ from spy it means “moment”).
As a baby, anyone can make any sound used in the langauges of the world. But as you listen to your parents and people surrounding you, you learn which ones you need to make, and how they “behave” in your langauge. You forget the sounds which you don’t need to communicate. It’s certainly possible to relearn these sounds when you are older (if you learn a language that uses them), but it’s much harder, and more so the older you get.
It seems that the more exposure at a young age a person has to languages other than their native one, the easier it will be for them to learn new languages for exactly the reason ShibbOleth gave:
This way when you learn a new langauge, chances are much better that you will already know how to make most of the sounds in it.
Hmm, now that I’ve typed this I’m wondering whether I really should post it. Well, here goes…
It’s a logical theory, but unfortunately language acquisition isn’t all that logical. That’s not to say it doesn’t follow rules, but they aren’t very intuitive.
I’m going to hazard a guess here, but since I’m a linguist, it’s an informed guess. Still, it’s not my area… you could probably find research that deals specifically with your question. (Do multilingual people have an easier time learning new languages as adults compared to monolingual people, especially with respect to pronunciation?)
Anyway, my guess is that learning many languages at a young age will not help you learn new languages as an adult unless the languages you are trying to learn are closely related to the languages you learned as a child.
For example, if I’m fluent in English, German and Dutch, it probably won’t be any easier for me to learn Chinese than it would be for somebody who is only fluent in English.
You might pick up an advantage if the phoneme space of the language you are learning is close to one of the languages you are fluent in, but unfortunately accent is much more than just nailing phonemes… you have prosody, stuff like stress, pitch and tone contours. Mess up any of these and it will be obvious to native speakers that you aren’t one, even if they can’t exactly put their finger on why.
There is a lot of variation from person to person, and a whole mess of variables that inform your question… it’s a doozy. But the main variable is still age. Once you hit puberty or thereabouts, your ability to pick up languages crashes and burns, and I think that overrides any comparatively minor benefits you might gain from shared lexicons, phoneme spaces, etc. between the languages you know and the language you want to know.
Most polyglots got that way by growing up exposed to many languages, not by dint of some special gift with language. The latter do exist, but I think that says more about plain old adaptable human intelligence than how we’re wired linguistically as a species.
Interesting post, hazel-rah. However, I would posit that growing up bilingual or multilingual would help in picking up languages as an adult, especially if the two languages you know are fairly dissimilar.
Why?
My theory is that if you grow up with different language background, you learn, simply, that different languages behave differently. From my observation in foreign language classes, students who grew up in an English-only environment had a more difficult time accepting the structures of foreign syntax than multilingual students. I grew up with English and Polish; both are Indo-European languages, but the former doesn’t inflect while the latter is heavily inflected. Words like “the” don’t exist in Polish and sentence structure is quite different. When I learned a bit of Hungarian or German or French, this helped greatly as I already had an intuitive understanding that different languages have different ways of expressing the same thoughts. This sounds like a big “duh,” but it isn’t. Many monolingual speakers is my class just couldn’t wrap their heads around this idea for awhile. Every other question was “Why is the word order different” or “Why would you say it this way” whenever syntax strayed away from English. “Why do they use double negatives,” “what’s the point of all this inflection,” etc, etc, etc.
I think an early experience with multiple languages helps put away such preconceived notions of language, if not actually somehow “hardwiring” the brain to accept additional languages better.
Now, this is only my theory based on my observation, so YMMV.
bcullman in my personal experience you’re right. My accent in German is fading quickly after only two years of speaking the tongue and learning it post the age of 30. Native speakers can already hear that I learnt the language in Bavaria because my weird Scandinavian French is slowly morphing into Bavarian.
My parents on the other hand who have lived outside of their home country for more than 35 years still have heavy Swedish accents in both their English and German, which they speak since a good 40 years. After living more than eight years in France when I was an infant they still had not picked up French on more than the basic level of shopping and ordering in restaurants. They both grew up without immersion in foreign languages and learnt English and German the formal way in school. My father even comically enough speaks foreign languages with the accent of his native region’s local Swedish dialect, if I think about it while he speaks that always rips me apart.
OK, this is getting interesting. I am actually fairly certain that research in language acquisition and cognitive plastics in infants have shown that ** ShibbOleth** and I have a very strong case. That being said hazel-rah still makes a very good point re the complexity of language acquisition and that there is greater ease to pick up languages with more recent relation to the ones you already speak. I’ll go get Cites for my stand. Be back with that later!
Er, actually, I do know three languages at an advanced level – English, Spanish, and Latin – and I’ve studied several others. Yes, I do have a heavy accent in all of them. No, I did not have a difficult time learning the grammar and vocabulary, as you (presumably) did. My point is that these skills are not necessarily correlated. I apologize if this is not what you were asking, but I had the impression it was.