Why Is It So Hard to Lose Your Accent?

Factual Questions
41

I was born and raised in Central Illinois, and have lived for the past five years in a little mining town in rural southeastern Missouri. Every morning, I listen to a local radio show from back home in Springfield via their website.

I notice their accents now, which weirds me out to no end. Four years ago I would have sworn up & down that Central Illinois’ accent was General American. It is not. The radio hosts and the callers have a sharper, more Chicago/Upper Midwest twinge to them than General American.

Which means three things. 1) I’ve thought all my life that my accent is General American. It is not. 2) I’ve undoubtedly picked up some of the local accent. 3) My family back in Illinois probably notice it by now.

42

Right. Many professionals/scholars (as guizot knows) use two different words for these two very different things: “regional accent” vs. “interference.”

43

For those wondering “Who does have a legit Texas accent if not John Wayne?”, I’d nominate Owen Wilson, Renee Zellwegger, Tommy Lee Jones, Matthew McConaughey, Patrick Swayze, and Jessica Simpson.

44

Whether or not JW’s accent was Texican, His most memorable roles were people purporting to come from that state, so that is the association we have.

Some actors become the character they are playing and some play themselves as a character.

45

My brother and I are only two years apart, but we’ve always had different accents. I was born in Australia, but moved to England at the age of 2, and lived in Leeds until I was 9, when the family returned to Australia. My brother was born in England, and moved to Australia at the age of 7. I’ve never spoken with a Yorkshire accent, even though I spent those language-formative years there, but have an accent somewhere between Received Standard English and educated Australian – probably influenced mostly by my parents. When we moved to Australia, my brother had such a broad Yorkshire accent that Australians had trouble understanding him, but with a few weeks of starting school in Australia was speaking with a Broad Australian accent. (My theory is it’s because I’m an introvert and he’s an extrovert.)

46

This x1000.

I wonder how anybody could stand talking to me if that is what I sound like…

47

I’ve posted this story (too) many times before, but it fits this thread.

Years ago when I visit a Chinese video store, I asked about movies starring certain actors and actresses. The store clerks praised my pronunciation, but said: “Why do you speak with a Hong Kong accent?”. I explained to them that I learned their names by listening to Hong Kong award shows!

To our untrained non-native ears, what we hear as perfectly fluent foreign language speech has an accent to anyone outside that particular region. Travel across the U.S. and tell me which speakers from which state/city/town have accent-free English. That old joke applies here: “I’m talking funny? It’s YOU that has a funny accent!”.

In this video, everyone is speaking Mandarin, but only one is speaking with the official Beijing accent, which you’d likely learn from any language course https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfNbq3s_51o.

48

The overwhelming majority, yes.
It’s because you don’t physically hear your own voice the way the rest of the world hears your voice. When your vocal chords do their thing it vibrates your earbones directly (and through some of your meat, which distorts it some) instead of having to pass through the air, thumping on your eardrum which in turns moves things inside the ear and so on IIRC. Something like that.

But in any event, yeah, hearing your own voice is usually pretty damn jarring at first. Or at second.

The other possible reason it fucks with people’s heads so much is that while most everybody is fairly confident in what they generally look like and move like (since there are mirrors everywhere from the day you are born), recording oneself is more rare so you don’t “grow up” into it and the way your voice “really” sounds isn’t really part of your self-image or construct of the self.

49

I had a professor who had a thick Chinese accent, really thick. It took a while to get used to it. But his English was fluent and his written English was elegant. He just didn’t care enough to change it.

When I hear someone speaking French and I can understand, it is invariably the case that the person is natively English speaking. I remember hearing one man give a bilingual lecture, switching between French and English. His English seemed native, but I couldn’t understand his French. Afterwards I asked whether his first language was French or English. He answered, “I don’t know.” Pierre Trudeau was like that too.

For a counter-example, just to show that some people seem to learn to speak without an accent, when I was in Japan, I went into a take-out sushi shop where they had packages in a refrigerator case. I pointed to the packages I wanted and the clerk, who was a teen-age girl started speaking perfect, fluent, unaccented American English. So I asked her if she had grown up in the US. “Oh no, I’ve been outside of Japan.” She was amazing.

Since I’ve read about a bit, I know that in switchng between English and French, almost everything changes. For example, even the t is articulated slightly differently; in French, the lip touches the backs of the upper teeth. The r is completely different and the u is a sound that isn’t like any of the English u’s, more like the German ü.

50

my brother took his first French class in high school in NJ. His 2nd was here in NC. He said here they spoke French with a southern accent.

51

I worked with a black engineer that was born in Kenya, adopted at 12 by a Scottish family. We had a salesman come in that had dealt with him on the phone. He was a 2nd generation scot, when he met Archie, the look on his face was priceless…

52

:slight_smile:

Is W’s Texas accent authentic?

53

After being trained as a French linguist, I started learning Russian.

My instructor told me I was speaking Russian with a French accent.

54

I think one thing is that people have very little idea of how they produce the sounds they make. So it is hard for them to modify what they do, since they don’t even know what they are doing.

Also, people using language are mostly focussed on communicating successfully. Monitoring and adjusting their speech production would be a whole different endeavour.

55

Ah but “which native speaker?” IS part of the question. Someone who speaks Argentinian Spanish sounds foreign to me; what they don’t necessarily sound is as if Spanish is not their first language. If your second-language teachers have tried to teach different dialects, you will end up with a mixed-dialect accent at best.

56

When speaking casually without microphones present, yes.

EDIT: What I mean by that is that I believe W strengthens his Texas accent when he’s speaking publicly. Could well be involuntary.

57

Total immersion in a new language is the best way to learn. Though you’ll pick up whatever inflections and local slang of the locals you’re learning from. However, Antonio Baderas suddenly speaking fluent old Norse in The 13th Warrior is nonsense because he couldn’t have developed the proper mouth movements without practice speaking. Comes back to what you hear isn’t always how you properly pronounce words.

I knew a girl who immigrated to Hawaii from the Philippines when she was eight and speaks fluent English, and speaks to her parents in English, but learned Tagalog by listening to her parents. She told me that her parents said her Tagalog was poor (though it just could be because they always criticized her), but she effectively communicated with her Filipino friends.

58

The necessity of proper muscle development to speak fluently is illustrated in this video (jump to 01:48) where the presenter explains how to place your tongue to properly pronounce ‘Yes’ in Korean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhf9NWKHjqE, which to non-native speakers may sound like ne (nae) or de (dae)*.

*Yes. I know romanization doesn’t do justice, but the it’s best we have.

While he says Koreans are confused by the slightly different inflections native speakers have, you can bet that unless you’re practiced or are extremely proficient in learning a new language, you’re likely to get a confused look from the listener when you say it the first time.

59

Re-reading the OP, to answer the questions of while children pick up new languages easier and a foolproof method.

As I stated above, muscle memory plays a big part in speech. The mouth muscle memory in young children haven’t fully developed to certain speech patterns and others (family and friends) are quick to correct incorrect pronunciation.

Which brings us to a foolproof method. Total immersion as I mentioned above. When we’re young, we’re more open to corrections to our speech and have a desire to speak like an adult. If you hear an adult say “abble” instead of “apple”, you’ll let it pass since it’s still intelligible. However, if a child says “abble”, they’ll be continually corrected until they pronounce it as “apple”.

A couple more examples of how important muscle control and memory is for fluent speech.

When someone has a condition that causes them to not be able to speak for an extended period (e.g. a stroke), they sometimes have to go to speech therapy to learn how to speak again or use a different set of muscles to be intelligible. When you go to the dentist and get a mouth full of novacaine, you have to force yourself to use different muscles to speak.

And in order for a ventriloquist to sound like they’re speaking fluently, they substitute sounds and letters for those that usually require lip movement.

"First off, you need to be capable of saying some of the letters of the alphabet, you’ll find it easy to say some letters with ease, letters that don’t require you to move your mouth. Letter’s such as “A,E,I,O,U” the vowels. If you tried saying the whole alphabet by yourself you’ll find letters that you can say fluently and letters that you have to sneak by, I have found that those letters would have to be “B,F,M,P,Q,V, and W”. These letters requires you to move your lips and make them touch each other for their unique sounds.

The key to saying these special letters are simply by “substitution”. You see ventriloquists substitute their (upper) lips with their tongue, so in order for you to say the letter ‘b’ you’re gonna apply pressure to the back of your front teeth with your tongue.

In order to say ‘M’ – you’re gonna do the same thing and substitute and go for the ‘N’ sound
In order to say ‘P’ – same thing and substitute and go for the ‘T’ sound
In order to say ‘F’ – you’re gonna hiss through your teeth like a ‘th’ sound but still your tongue is gonna be touching the back of your teeth
In order to say ‘V’ – you’re gonna substitute ‘th’ sound
In order to ‘W’ – substitute the “ooh” sound as in “boot”

When you start to perform in the ventriloquism field, you’ll find out that as long as the audience could interpret what the ventriloquist and the ventriloquist dummy are saying by making out ‘most’ of the word, you can get away with it, but think about whether you want your audience to think about what the dummy is saying all the time."

Edit: https://theartofventriloquism.wordpress.com/

60

I am of the belief that it comes down to not hearing certain sounds once you grow older. As a child, you essentially make all the sounds, but your parents only react to the ones that are close to their native language. As a result, you determine that the other sounds you make are not important and gradually completely disregard them altogether as they are not important for communicating with those around you.

As an adult, when you learn a new language you use the frame of reference that you know in order to pronounce new sounds. If you grew up multi-lingual then you have more to choose from and therefore can detect subtle differences in sound that you would otherwise not hear without a lot of work.

This ability to hear other sounds is why people with musical training or ability can often be close to if not completely accent-less as well. Since they participate in an activity that requires hearing subtle differences, especially if they are part of an ensemble where it is not just playing the correct note that is important, but matching the rest of the group, they are able to hear the small differences between two similar sounds in a language.

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