Note to pedants: of course we all have accents. Duh.
The winner in this contest will be someone who did not speak a word of English until fairly late in life (mid-teens, say) and then acquired a use of English such that people could not readily tell that the person was a non-native speaker.
Bonus points for more advanced years before speaking English, less exposure to the language before beginning to speak, more extensive documentation (preferably sound clips). I’d do this for any language, but I can only tell how well the person spoke in the only language I speak fluently so: English.
I can’t provide any audio clips, but I’ve known several. One was German, who went to grad school in southern CA and married a woman from there. I was absolutely floored when I found he had grown up in Germany. I know one other German with absolutely unaccented English. Then there was a Hungarian who spent a sabbatical here from his English position. Although British accented, his English was just perfect. His wife’s English was thickly accented. He was a cousin of Erno Rubik, BTW. Then there was a Danish woman I met, the wife of an English mathematician. British accented but perfect English. It happens; it is not common, but it happens.
A co-worker and her family emigrated from Germany when she was in her early teens. Her accent is pure Georgia, which is where they emigrated to. She gets complimented by guests on learning German so well and they nearly faint when she says she is German.
I imagine a lot has to do with when you learned, and how immersed you’ve been. Someone who moved to an English-speaking country at 10, and then was pretty much totally immersed in English thereafter is probably essentially without accent. Look at someone like Mila Kunis for an example; spoke only Russian until 7, and after that is apparently fully bilingual in Russian and English. I don’t get any foreign accent from her English speaking whatsoever.
Israeli actress Alona Tal (Veronica Mars, Supernatural, SEAL Team etc.) has no English-speaking background and first moved to the U.S. in her 20s, but she somehow managed to acquire a near-perfect American accent:
Yeah, I’m talking about adults. Kids are amazing at picking up languages. English is actually my second language, but I’ve been speaking it since I was three years old, so I’m a native speaker. Once a professor in grad school asked me if English was my first language and was delighted to find that technically it was my second. (He taught linguistics and was very proud of himself for hearing something in my pronunciation of one consonant that no one else has ever remarked upon. Frankly, I think he was full of shit.)
I don’t know at what point he started learning English, but the author Sanche de Gramont was a Frenchman who became an American journalist/historian Ted Morgan. He was one of the first to come to my mind. Another was Emmanuel Todd, who was quite often on TV in the UK commenting on French politics, but although entirely fluent in English, he still has some French inflections in his voice.
Others well-known in the UK and sounding entirely British that I was thinking of (Sandi Toksvig, Katie Boyle) turn out to have had British mothers and to have gone through a largely Anglophone education, so they presumably don’t count for this purpose.
You may be thinking of Vladimir Posner, who was born in France and spent most of his life in the USSR, but did live in New York City as a teenager - where he must have learned English from Uncle Louie.
Same here. My Hungarian ex-girlfriend has an accent that was a mixture of California and Birmingham, Alabama, where she lived as a teen and then later in her 20s. I could not identify a hint of Hungarian accent on her when she spoke English. It was American, and perhaps difficult to place because of the mixture of the two accents, but it leaned heavily towards SoCal.
In the reverse direction, I have a friend from Cambridge, UK, who moved to Eastern Hungary in his late teens/early 20s to teach English. I met him in Budapest, and every time we went to pubs, local folks were absolutely incredulous that he was a British native. They would all think he was from Eastern Hungary. (And in Eastern Hungary, they all assumed he was a local.) Happened over and over in my presence, to the point that at least one bar patron was convinced he was lying.
There’s a good number more, but these are the closest to me that I know.
I believe the key word is “actress”. Any individual will have more or less of a knack for voices, but if I needed her to speak English with a thick Persian accent, I’m sure she would find the appropriate dialect coaches and make it happen.
I don’t know if he had an accent, but Joseph Conrad’s writing absolutely floors me. From his wikipedia article:
Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature.
From the same article’s notes:
Rudyard Kipling felt that “with a pen in his hand he was first amongst us” but that there was nothing English in Conrad’s mentality: “When I am reading him, I always have the impression that I am reading an excellent translation of a foreign author.” Zdzisław Najder’s similar observation: “He was […] an English writer who grew up in other linguistic and cultural environments. His work can be seen as located in the borderland of auto-translation.”
Vladimir Nabokov is also too good to be true, but he was educated in English and spoke it at home.
Mila Kunis is a native Russian speaker who moved to America when she was seven. I realize this isn’t the age the OP said but she was still old enough to have established her original language.
Generally they do it before the age of five or so. After that, their native language is established and learning a second language is no different than an adult doing it. (I will acknowledge there are disputes on what age children peak in their language learning ability and even if such a childhood peak exists.)
