Some children, particularly very close siblings or twins, develop their own language. Use of this language usually disappears as they get older and they have to socialize with larger groups of people.
I agreed that musically inclined people are probably better at speaking a new language fluently. But this is probably due to repetition and beat of the songs. I can follow and sing (terribly) foreign language songs, but can’t pronounce the words without following the beat.
Edit: More thoughts about social integration and speech patterns. Young children can understand baby talk, possibly because they remember the speech patterns. Also, children tend to lose their baby talk once they start attending school due to peer pressure. “You talk like a baby!”
I think so too. If you hear him when he’s not doing formal public speeches, it’s a pretty normal accent- in line with his socioeconomic status and education. But he dials it up sometimes I think.
His accent is a bit rednecky, but as long as he’s not dialing it up, it’s not out of the ordinary.
I’m another one whose accent changed pretty dramatically when I was growing up.
I was an Army brat, and moved from Texas (7th grade) to Tennessee (8th-9th grade) to the suburbs north of Chicago, Illinois (10th-12th grades).
After we moved to Illinois, I called my mother’s work once and asked to speak with her, and one of her co-workers said to her that there was a “southern boy” asking for her on the phone.
At school, everyone called me “Tex,” and not in a nice way – more mocking than anything else. Kids want to fit in, and I guess I did, too, and so without any conscious effort my southern accent just vanished over a period of a few months.
After high school, I went back to Texas for college, and took a linguistics class my freshman year. On the first day, the professor tried to figure out where each person in the class was from based on their accent and words for various objects (like “soda” vs. “pop” vs. “Coke”). He was completely flummoxed with me, and finally concluded that I had moved around a lot growing up.
When I go visit my extended family in Texas, a bit of a Texas accent will creep back into my speech. For one thing, I get my “y’all” back for a while, because it’s such a useful word…but I get funny looks when I say it after returning home to Connecticut, so it tends to disappear again. But for the most part, my accent hasn’t really changed since high school in Illinois, and people now have a hard time believing I’m originally from Texas.
Yes–but the OP itself is clearly referring to the issues one faces learning the language within the context of one particular dialect (not issues across dialects). Regardless of which dialect, the learner usually has challenges in sounding native-like to speakers of that dialect–whatever the dialect may be. Obviously there will be complications if someone is first trying to sound “native-like” in one country and then goes to another, or if one is learning from teachers of constantly changing dialects.
Some of the posters in this thread are confusing that challenge in the OP with an entirely different proposition–shifting between regionalisms of one’s own native language–and whether any given speaker can be said to have “no accent.” That’s introducing a totally different topic, (which might be better suited for an entirely new thread).
Just remembered. Years ago one of my supervisors told us she used to speak with a heavy Southern accent and worked hard to stop it. When we found out about it, another co-worker and I started speaking with a Southern accent around her. After a few weeks, she (the supervisor) started speaking with a Southern accent again. I felt kind of bad, she was kind of a jerk.
I had a Spanish teacher who spoke with the classic Barcelona accent and another who was from Cuba. They not only had distinctly different accents, they even had different terms for the same thing.
I’ve also had some exposure to Alsatian French, Belgian French, Parisian French, and Quebecois French. They’re close to sounding like different languages altogether.
For four years I worked in a city 175 miles from my home. The people there thought I talked too fast. Whenever I came back home, my friends wondered why I spoke with a drawl.
Ah, I think the terminology being used, i.e. ‘losing’ your accent, or becoming ‘free’ from accent suggests that the process is only a matter of specifically not speaking in a certain way. That is really only half of the process - when changing your accent, you’re making a conscious/unconscious decision not to use sound and use [y] instead, so the end result is ‘gaining’ the prevailing pronunciation style that is being used around you (to fit in, avoid losing face, etc).
Accent is not a layer that sits on top of some sort of English (or other language) prototype, it is rooted deeper than that, in the scheme of sounds you know, which is why it is so difficult to unlearn what you’ve grown up with. The more adept you are with your voice, and the more training and practice you put yourself through, the more likely it is you will ‘pass’ as a local.
My accent is like that, being another Army brat.
My mother, from recordings I have of her before her marriage, had a very very posh upper class accent, which she has (mostly) lost.
There was a local langauage I learnt, when we were posted in a particular region and years later, I had occassion to speak to a colleague who was native to that region in her language. She burst out laughing. Said I sounded, well what you guys would call “hillbilly”.
And an accent isn’t just a matter of pronunciation. People in different areas use different intonations, speaking speed, etc. I’ve noticed that people in certain regions of California use a little “upspeak” (where your voice raises a little at the end of a sentence, as if you were asking a question.) People from the upper Midwest sound less emotive, as well as maybe a little nasal. And, as the old joke goes, a Southerner can make “shit” a five-syllable word.
Those things, with the possible exception of speed, are generally all considered to be part of pronunciation. What you’re getting at, I think, is that it’s not just the segmental aspects of pronunciation, but also the suprasegmental (or prosodic) aspects of pronunciation, which make up “accent” or dialect. I agree with you. In fact I said this in post #17.
Years ago I worked for a catalog company. I took a call from a very polite young man who lived in the Deep South. His last name was Hill. He pronounced it with 3 if not 4 syllables. I finally had to ask him to spell it.
When I took a semester of German at university there was a kid from Georgia in the class. It is nearly impossible not to laugh when you hear German spoken with a deep southern drawl. People were biting their fingers and putting their heads down on the desk trying not to laugh out loud. Think of the Biggus Dickus scene in “The Life of Brian.”
My father emigrated (semi-involuntarily) from China to the US in 1949. I was born 11 years later. For as long as I remember he had only a very slight Chinese accent; mainly he would make occasional plural/pronoun errors or mildly mangled idioms (“holy mackerels” was my favorite - I still say it that way when around family). However, he was immersed into a culture where Chinese speakers were few and far between and he married an American. When we visited China in the 80s everyone there thought his American accented Chinese was hilarious (not to mention his American clothing).
My aunt came to the US a few years before my father. She married a Chinese man she met here, and also lived in a part of the country (LA) with a larger Chinese population. They spoke Chinese together at home (although my cousins never picked much up); her accent remained pretty heavy, and her husband was nearly incomprehensible.
For grins, can you attempt to spell out those 3 or 4 syllables? I’ve lived in the Southern U.S. all my life, and I can only come up with 2-syllable renderings.
