AIBU to ask if you should adopt the accent when speaking in another language?

[WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll]

Every time I hear a British person speaking a foreign language to a native speaker of that language, it makes me irrationally wince when they make no attempt to use a more native-sounding accent. I was always taught at school and college that you should use an authentic-sounding accent and hearing a Brit speaking fluent 'forrin' but in a very British accent sounds to me as though they aren't really trying.

However, this never seems to happen the other way around - and this doesn't seem weird to me at all. Regardless of how flawless and even idiomatic their English is, it's still always very clear from their accent that they ARE actually French, German, Spanish or whatever. And why wouldn't/shouldn't it be?

The only exception that I can think of is when I heard Morten Harket on the radio a little while ago, and I didn't know that it was him at first, as he sounded so very much like a native Brit - but then he might have lived here for a long time.

A Cockney wouldn't adjust their accent when speaking to a Scot or a Geordie. A woman wouldn't feel the need to lower the pitch of her voice in solidarity when talking to a man. And could it be seen as mockery or even cultural appropriation if they did? What about English people learning Welsh - should they try to emulate the accent too?

Any thoughts? Am I just being Anglocentric and/or patronising? Forriners with an alternative perspective on it particularly welcome!

I'd also say it's not true that you can't learn how to do sounds from different languages past the age of 10 or 12 - I was rubbish at rolling my rrrrs at school and couldn't get the hang of it at all - but 6 weeks of working in Italy when I was around 30 and I can roll them like a good'un now!

I’d be interested to see research on this (although personal anecdotes are interesting).

www.mpi.nl/q-a/questions-and-answers/when-should-a-child-learn-a-second-language

As a rule of thumb, a language which is learned before the ages of 6-9 is typically learnt to a level where the speaker has no detectable accent and is very comfortable using it. However, this requires that a child spends a considerable amount of time hearing and using the novel language. On the other hand, if a language is learnt later, speakers may have a slight accent in their pronunciation but may otherwise reach a very proficient native-like level

From “Factors affecting degree of foreign accent in an L2”

The most important factor in predicting the degree to which the accent will be noticeable (or strong) is the age at which the non-native language was learned.[6][7] The critical period theory states that if learning takes place after the critical period (usually considered around puberty) for acquiring native-like pronunciation, an individual is unlikely to acquire a native-like accent.[6]

From the Linguistic Society of America

Native speakers of a language do tend to master some of its sounds before others. In English,p, m, n, h, and w are among the first consonants acquired by children, while z, j, v,and the two th sounds (as in think and this) are among the last to be mastered. But all of the sounds of a language are generally acquired before puberty by a native speaker. Typically, it's only non-native learners that have long-term difficulty with a sound. When you learn a second language, you may have difficulty with sounds that don't occur in your native language; for example, some languages have trilled r's, 'clicks' made with the tongue as air is taken in, or sounds made much farther back in the throat than English sounds. Surprisingly, though, the hardest sounds to learn may be those that are similar to, but just a bit different from, sounds in your native language. It seems to be very difficult to overcome the tendency to keep using the familiar sounds from your native language. In this sense, your native language causes 'interference' in your efforts to pick up the new language.

cauliflower

I don’t phonetically transcribe recordings

I don't miss that to be honest.

Hi icedpurple

3 App Ling MAs on one thread
What did you end up doing for a job?

From effectivelanguagelearning.com

Pronunciation is one area where the younger-is-better assumption may have validity. Research (e.g., Oyama, 1976) has found that the earlier a learner begins a second language, the more native-like the accent he or she develops.

I didn't think the critical period was anything to do with actual muscles.

I thought that Japanese baby study showed that if you don't use a sound your brain junks it.

True about the brain dumping sounds it doesn’t need. As far as I remember. But I know I learnt about the muscles and I can’t find the info! frustratingly.

That Japanese baby study was brilliant if slightly strangely named.

I can concur with pp that it's not impossible to loose your accent. My dad grew up speaking Irish (not the accent the actual language) and didn't move to Liverpool until I was 17.

I'm 27 now and he doesn't sound Irish at all, as in people would regularly ask what part of Ireland he was from (possibly because almost everyone here seems to have some sort of Irish ancestry) and it never happens now. My aunt always gives out to him for his scouse accent whenever we go home too . I do have a bit of an accent still even though mine wasn't as strong as his to begin with. But he is musical and I am most definitely not so maybe there is a link

Late to this very interesting thread, but can someone explain what is meant by a "British" accent? Is there something that unifies all accents in Britain and makes them distinct from ( say) American accents?
I'm trying to think what the unifying factors might be, but some Irish ( so part of Britain I think)accents sound more like American than say Estuary English.
Is there an accent which is British or English as opposed to Scouse/Brum etc?
I'd always thought my Mum didn't have an accent ( I would describe it as unstressed very light RP) but my Scouser DH thinks she does have an accent, and that it was his Mum, also Scouse, who didn't have an accent to his ears.
Would be interested to hear opinions on this.

I'm an interpreter, as you might have gathered by my name.

I have the ear/brain for languages. I speak four languages, but am not currently working with all.

Accents are a very personal thing, some people have a heavy accent despite living somewhere for decades, others blend it, but it's true that the older you are when you start with the language the more difficult it is. On a good day I sound almost like a Brit, on a bad day I have more of an accent.

I agree that it's very much the intonation that's crucial, sometimes more than good grammar. You can get away with a lot of dodgy grammar when your intonation is right and your speaking voice is good.

I love using languages.

Dear God, DelphiniumBlue, where are you from? Ireland is not part of Britain!

If you want to hear a wonderful example of someone speaking French very badly, go to a production of the Terence Rattigan play 'French Without Tears'.

I try to not be like this- apparently my French sounds as if I am from Belgium and my German is northern German.

Villainous, can never remember the difference between UK And GB, and I have Northern Irish friends who consider themselves British. In my mind, Eire is the south and Ireland the whole island.
Sorry if I got it wrong, I qualified it because I wasn't sure.
But my point was about querying what a British accent was, as mentioned by earlier posters, and for those purposes am wondering if for example it could include a Glaswegian or Belfast accent, which both sound very different to ( say) cockney ,and which sound more similar to some accents from the USA than to other from UK/GB.

Dutch people always seem to have a great accent, and Scandinavians

Been chuckling at this all the way through the thread. Anders Fogh, anyone?

@mummabearfourbabybears
However nothing makes my toes curl like hearing people say a word during a normal English conversation. And using an accent, watching Great British Bake Off where they just say the French word in a French accent. Terrible! French people don't say English words in a london or Birmingham accent in the middle of their sentences.

Whenever people do that it reminds me of Henry Paker (comedian) and his Pain au Chocolat routine

What accent should foreigners speaking English adapt?

Some posters are confusing accent with pronunciation. I haven’t seen the sketch, but to take the pain au chocolat example, if you wander into a boulangerie and pronounce it phonetically as it would be in English as ‘Payne awe chocolate’ (well, kind of) that will be gibberish to the person behind the counter unless you give up and point.

But as the nasalised vowel sound in ‘pain’ doesn’t exist in English, some people struggle, and you can’t really give the words a French pronunciation without making a very French sound, which seems to cause some English people (in my experience) deep horror and embarrassment. I’m not sure why! (Am not English.)

There’s definitely some fear of being thought pretentious and ridiculous — I’ve seen lots of Mn threads decrying people who would walk into a London bakery and ask for a pain au chocolat with a French pronunciation, for instance...

The assumption the U.K. has many accents but other countries have just one is a bit silly. In Ireland, for example, you can easily tell the difference between your Cork man and a Dublin chap. As many have said, it is correct pronunciation that is key to being understood.

I don’t think any part of France has an estuary accent. Can you imagine “ Bon Jewer,, Ja Sweez EnGlace, come.
Age when you started learning is certainly an important factor in allowing people to feel comfortable using the spoken word overseas. It’s not the only one though. My father in law left school at 14 without any qualifications. He went on to learn Romanian and Russian at the Sorbonne and was taken as a native speaker of French by the time he was mid 20s. I’m very much an English speaker of French and will ever be but the children are all fluent, having learnt from a very young age.

There are loads French accents, but I don't think there are so many as in the UK and they aren't so different so close together. Take Liverpool and Manchester, the accents are very different and there can't be much more than 30 miles between the too. France doesn't have that, to such an extent, I wonder whether other countries do.

I’ve just come back from a holiday in southwest France with Parisian friends. The local accent where we were staying was as different from my friends’ and my Parisian French (I used to live in Paris, and though I don’t any more, the majority of people I still speak French with are Parisians) as Mancunian from Estuary, and I noticed my friends converging slightly when talking to locals in shops etc. I didnt, because though formerly fluent though now rusty, I’d never be taken for a native speaker.

Cauliflowersqueeze from personal experience my two children learnt Portuguese at 8 and 10 and have been living in Brazil for 5 years. Both are fluent and both would be accepted as Brazilians BUT the one that was 10 still has an ever so slight foreign twang in his accent, the one that was 8 sounds 100% native. It is almost impossible to hear the twang and probably wouldn't be detected outside our region, so for example Brazilians from other states would assume he was from our state. Some people have asked him if he's always lived in Brazil, and some teachers are often surprised to learn that they are siblings as they assume DD is native and DS is not. But my mother's friend from another part of Brazil cannot detect it at all.
I also have a friend that was 10 when he moved from France and he is the same. You cannot tell he's French but sometimes there's just a little hint of a giveaway in his accent, which is from the same area of London as me.
I think what some people consider to be 100% sounding like a native, might sound like that to people who don't have that accent but I'm willing to bet it's not like that for people who actually have actually those accents since childhood.

I think you need to get out more OP.

That's so true Linoleum had a friend in college who was English but had been brought up in Spain from being a toddler, her Spanish accent was native perfect but her English accent, while again RP perfect to most people, was maybe a little too perfect with an almost undefinable foreignness to it.