Why you have an accent in a foreign language 

I had four years of intensive training in both written and spoken French and was considered to speak it on a near native level. When I joined the military my first tour of duty was, of course, Germany. I took several crash courses in spoken German so that I could travel around the country without a language barrier. As I traveled I was often teased that I was the first American they had ever met who spoke German like a native Frenchman. It was a wonderful ice breaker wherever I traveled !

Interesting. I am a native Cantonese speaker. It would be in my wildest dream to imagine that Cantonese and Italian actually have something in common😅

Stress pattern is one of the most important aspect of an accent. I have been living in the US for 5 years now, and the stress patterns were the last thing I managed to adapt to sound kinda American. It is so important that if you do the pronunciations right but don’t get the stress & pitch right, you will never sound perfect. On the flipside, if you get the stress/pitch right and pronounce a few words the non-traditional way, you will still sound very perfect.

You have an accent all the time in any language, including your own.

There was way more information in this short 3-min video than I was expecting.

I think there is something that should also be included in this article: you are trained to listen to the sounds of your mother tongue, so when you listen to a foreign language your brain is processing it like it would your mother tongue, i.e. you don't listen for example German like a German would, you listen to German like you were listening to your mother tongue and so you will try to speak the words you listen but they are not the exact sounds a German would hear. With exposure your brain can train itself to listen to the proper sound emphasis of the foreign language and that will enhance your accent but some people never have enough exposure. I think often the listening training is ignored when teaching languages and that is a shame.

Reasons listed: 1) Individual sounds differ between languages 2) Several sounds are not possible in some languages -> people insert/adjust the sound to fit the the rules of their own 3) Differences in stress patterns 4) Differences in intonation/language rythym

Also some sounds just simply don’t exist in your target language. Many foreigners struggle with the two “TH” sounds in English whereas many anglophones struggle with the trilled “R” of Spanish.

While at a conference in Denmark, I tried to learn some phrases in Danish - primarily "I don't speak Danish, I speak English". Everyone said I spoke with a Swedish accent. Thank you "The Swedish Chef" from Sesame Street.

When I first went to India, I had a hard time understanding the way many Indians spoke English. To me, the words just ran together with no particular emphasis. Over time, my brain learned how to sort it out. Once I began learning Hindi, it made sense to me why these speakers spoke English the way they did. And it was always speakers who had learned English in school, but never traveled out of the country to be exposed to native English speakers. The same would be true, I'm sure, for any language.

they REALLY gotta teach this in language classes. this stuff feels so important to me but is NEVER taught in classrooms in my experience

I began my investment journey at the age of 33, primarily through hard work and dedication. Now at the age of 38, I am thrilled to share that my passive income exceeded $100k in a single month for the first time. This success reinforces the importance of the advice mentioned earlier. It is not about achieving quick wealth, but rather ensuring long-term financial prosperity.

I’m bilingual in English and Tamil (a Dravidian language from southern India). Along the years I’ve learnt Hindi, Spanish and German to varying degrees of fluency. My struggles with these latter languages have given me new respect for people who strive to speak in languages other than own, even if their speech is heavily accented. What’s important after all is communication between different cultures, even if said communication is not perfect! 😊

This is pretty funny because I have just started learning Spanish to connect with my family from Peru and I don't want to butcher their language so I say a couple sentences in English like my dad would with his Peruvian-accent before speaking a sentence in Spanish. It really helped! But then my family in Peru mistaken me for being fluent because my accent is polished, haha. And now I understand it's due to the stress my dad put on words. How neat!

Summary: Foreign accents exist because people try to speak other languages with the stresses, timings, and intonations (and sometimes grammar) of their own language. Want to sound more like a native speaker quickly? Speak their language like how they try to speak your language. Just keep in mind what dialect of their language they speak. If you want to sound from Paris, don't copy someone from Quebec City, etc.

I liked this video because I'm a spanish speaker and when I speak english I have a very strong latino accent. Not as strong as Sofia Vergara though haha. 😅

That was fun! Wish it was longer and more in depth. I'm sure different languages have their own idiosyncrasies beyond the few you mentioned here. Even this superficial understanding would be of benefit for people seeking to understand more about other cultures. This would be of benefit to the WORLD!

Am just disappointed that this video was extremely short...it was soooo engaging that I never wanted it to end❤

I'm an Indo-Mauritian My native language is french based Mauritian Creole. Learnt English and French as from age four and Hindi as from age six I've lived in France since age 19 People from the Indian Ocean, Reunionese and Malagasies, immediately identify my Mauritian accent when I'm speaking French French people mistake my accent, when I'm speaking French, for a posh British accent When speaking English, my accent isn't like the French accent at all My accent when speaking Hindi is, I guess, like any Bihari accent. I've never heard a record of it and no Indian has ever commented on it All this is very surprising because when I speak French, I don't hear my own accent. To my own ears, I have a neutral Parisian accent I don't know if it is related with accents but despite learning French since age four and listening to native French speakers on television and in real life since then, I can't pronounce the french "ar" correctly I can't say "Chartres" and "Montmartre" properly because I don't naturally open my mouth enough for the "ar" syllable I actually dreaded the prospect of working at Chartres when I received an internship offer there 😅

I speak 3 languages, and I don't care about my foreign accent. It's a charming ❤ I prefer don't judge just because, it's cute listening the foreign accents foreign people speaking my native language. I'm a interpreter, and communication is more important than accent. I'm leaving in US, and I'm brazilian. I never gonna be american and any point to try to looks like one 😂😂😂😂😂

I'm Italian and I used to live in Manchester, UK. I'm not very fluent in English and my grammar isn't so accurate, but I actually can speak. Well, for some reason British people often mismatched my accent calling me a Swedish or Dutch. Very funny! My theory: Italians are usually depicted as tanned guys with black mustaches and dark eyes... but I'm pale and I've got blond hair and blue eyes. I think the sight took over the listening.

Very true! And it’s rarely taught in language courses, let alone in schools. It’d be great to have more of these videos on specifics for different languages, at least for native English speakers. Cheers!

Berlusconi is a bad example when it comes to listening through walls these days.

Mainly these are the things that foreign language learners neglect when they learn a new language. If you study opera, you have learn to sound like a native in whatever language you are speaking.

There's nothing wrong with speaking with an accent. I find it makes people more interesting

Funny, smart and -as US Americans never used to say- spot on.

As someone who has a master's degree in applied languages, during my studies I learnt that the phonology of our native dialect entails a social identity. Therefore, we are hard encoded to show this identity with our phonology, in such a manner that hearing ourselves in a foreign accent seems wrong and It deters us from doing It.

My Dutch has a slight English accent. (Englsh is my first language) My father once joked that I speak English like a foreigner. My German friends tell me I speak German with a Dutch accent. My French friends tell me I speak French with a Dutch accent. My Thai friends tell me I speak Thai like Thai people. (I'm not entirely convinced) My Spanish friends tell me I speak Spanish like a Peruvian (that's where I learned el Castellano) I rarely speak Italian, but I rather suspect it sounds not like an Italian.

I am a native Mandarin speaker from Malaysia. My friends from China usually find my accent strange/funny. Even I try my best to speak in "standard Beijing accent", but to no avail. It's still wildly different from theirs (especially those from northern China). Nonetheless, it's COMPLETELY MUTUALLY INTELLIGIBLE as long as we speak in the standard Mandarin regardless of accents. My advice is... just make sure you pronounce clearly in the standard varieties of your target languages, accents don't really matter.

As a scholar of Italian linguistics, allow me a correction (if it is such). Actually, Italian distinguishes length for both vowels and consonants (long and short), not only in word morphology but also and especially at the prosodic level. (Nespor, 2014). The reason why English speakers notice that syllabic homorhythm is, in my opinion, due to two main causes : 1) the fact that the stereotype of the Italian accent is actually drawn from Neapolitan, 2) the fact that an Italian locutor has a tendency not to distinguish long and short vowels in English because simply from the point of view of the Italian source phonology, English words almost never present that structure that triggers vowel elongation in Italian instead. Rather, English words invite, if anything, an Italian to double the consonant and/or add a final schewa. None of this, however, implies that Italian always has syllables of equal length, for such is only a foreign ear's impression of the Italian language.

When one learns a language under age of 20 the probability to have an accent in that language is very slim. The younger one is learning a new language the better one is not to have an accent. That is because the vocal cords are fully developed by age of 20. I have been told by British ppl that all of us Canadians, Australians, Americans…have an accent 😅So there!

Your choice of using Kylian Mbappé as an example is very interesting, especially for the French I am. Actually, you are right, his name is pronounced "mbappé"... but many French people do not pronounce it correctly and say.... "embappé", like the English speaker. :) This comes from the fact that the Mbappé name comes from Cameroon, and like many other african names, it uses a combination of consonants at the beginning that the French language does not have. So we don't always know whether the 'M' from "Mbappé" is an independant consonant that we should spell (as if it was "M-Bappé") or if it is a combination with the following 'p' that has to be pronounced together (which, thus, is the correct way). So, sometimes we say "Embappé" whereas we are totally able to say "Mbappé". :)

I'm missing two crucial factors in this video 1 your speechmuscles are trained to pronounce certain sounds - even in your native language(s) 2 if you don't hear languages as an infant, you can lose the ability to hear that some letters are different. That's why some Anglo's have trouble distinguishing french "vous" from "vue" , or think that spanish J sounds like H - or how some Asians have trouble with R/L, B/P, K/G...

Ì think that having a foreign accent doesn't matter. What's importante is that people understand you and you understand people. I like accents.

i learned a lot of languages and enjoyed doing so. i always made it a point to try to imitate the sounds and pronunciations as closely to the original as possible. people tell me i speak excellent italian and a lot of english speakers believe i am native or have been living in an english speaking country for a long time 😊 the best thing was to read texts out loud, listen carefully and try to nail the intonation 🎉

Really wish I could remove my accent completely. Most of my friends from England really despise the way I speak as it's unintelligible, but Americans seem to have no issue with it. Like, it's not that my English proficiency is terrible... it's just that I'd love to speak it as well as native speakers out of respect for their native language.

I'm American but speak French, Russian, some Turkish, German , Norwegian, Danish, Czech and dabbled in Arabic, Greek so my accent is interesting lol

MOST rich people stay rich by spending like the poor and investing without stopping then most poor people stay poor by spending like the rich yet not investing like the rich but impressing them

This is all really interesting to know. I wish sounding like a native speaker weren't such a goal for many language learners. I think these differences are actually pretty charming and I love when I meet someone who speaks my language in a very different way.

In my case the explanation is simple: little contact in real life with native speakers AND the fact that many times I cannot hear the difference of two different sounds so I can't even try to imitate them. Also English I think makes very little sense phonetically so I basically need to hear all the words multiple times in order to understand how they should be pronounced.

Old ESL teacher here. You forgot that students tend to pick up on the accent of their teacher, I can almost always tell (with more fluent students) if their teacher was American or British. Except Scots, never heard a student end up with a Scots accent from a Scots teacher. But I have had students email after arriving in Glasgow for uni, to say, "I know they are speaking English, but I can't understand a word they are staying."

I speak fluent Spanish and can tell when someone has a Spanish accent while speaking English lol I cant tell the country theyre from but can tell their first language is Spanish🥰

Well for your information, we, french, also pronounce MBAPPE as EMBAPE because the letter M in the french alphabet is pronounced EMM

I live in Canada, speak 5 languages, my first language was Polish. I speak English with a slight accent. Now, I also speak Polish with a slight foreign accent. Lol...

I have an accent in my native language.

I taught conversational English in a European country, and when I was asked how to lose one's accent I replied "stop using the rules of your native language and listen to how the other language's natives speak theirs". Not sure if my students listened to my advice, but as I was teaching English I was also learning their language and have achieved virtually zero accent, though my vocabulary is merely adequate.

I am an American Mid Atlantic English speaker who took German language classes from middle school thru college. I have also watched 60 years worth of WW2 movies with German actors speaking English and German. When I flew back to the USA via Lufthansa, I only spoke a few polite words to the Attendant in German. She thought I was a German national and gave me the incorrect US Customs Questionaire to fill out. Ich bin ein Amerikaner.

Breath control is also huge! In English (especially American English) we stereotypically let out one constant stream of air and squeak out several nasally words that run together, but in German, you use all the air in your chest to really vocalize your words, taking pauses and making several glottal stops

As an Art student from London, living in South Wales in the early eighties, in what used to be Monmouthshire, with a lot of other students from the west of England, I picked up a west country twank, which took weeks to disappear, when I left college and returned to London. My normal English accent is North West London middle class. So I can see how what is being spoken about could happen.

I'm a native English speaker. My English accent is basically Southern posh with probably a hint of Canadian left over from my early childhood. I speak French with the accent of a Parisian fonctionnaire. However, my spoken French actually isn't quite fluent. I can participate perfectly well in conversation, but make lots of mistakes and often find that I lack vocabulary, which is the source of a great deal of mystification. I also speak appallingly bad German with, apparently, a Prussian accent, which I think must be the result of the war films we used to watch on Sunday afternoons at boarding school 50 years ago.

I am a native bengali speaker from India, and even though Bengali is an Indo European language, like all other North Indian languages(Hindi, Punjabi etc), it's pronounciations of words are completely different from those languages even though most words are just the same, so the Schwa sound is not there in Bengali which is replaced with Awe sound(as in awesome) and other languages that are in Eastern part of India and the reason is the influence of sino tibetan languages(which are prevalent in north eastern regions). So, Assamese is east to Bengal and has even though it's very similar to bengali it has more sino tibetan influence, On the other hand Odia which is south of Bengal has more dravidic influence even though it's similar to Bengali. The equivalence can be found in Hindi sister languages such as Nepali which is somewhere between Hindi and Bengali and have both the schwa sound and the Awe sound. Now, if you consider the bengali language of Bangladesh, the accent has more austro asiatic influence...and you go further east towards Sylhette, Tripura and Chitagong, in addition to the austro asiatic, you also get additional sino tibetan influence and even though it's bengali, it becomes completely unintelligible. So, aforementioned Assamese or Odia is more intelligible to a Bengali speaker of Indian Bengal than the Bengali speaker of Syllhette, Tripura and Chitagong...

Native Japanese speaker; English is my third language. I was hoping you'd go into why people can speak a nonnative language for a long time and *still* have trouble with the pronunciation like the intro seemed to promise.

This is the least accurate explanation. The aim reason why you speak with an accent is because you have a set of sounds of your native language that your brain tends to use in a foreign language. That’s it

In Farsi, we don't have short vowels. So, for example, we pronounce pitch as peach. Probably, the most famous one is "Sun of a beach"! 😂

Everyone have "accent", even native speaker in their native language.

Yes yes and yes! This is one thing that I am always paying close attention to. (So far I have learned with varying degrees of fluency English, Spanish, Farsi and now Arabic as a native German-speaker). Recently I was speaking Farsi with somone (actually I learned around afghans, hence I speak more Dari) and the amazing thing was that her immediate response was that I am speaking with a Dari accent, which blew my mind. For me the most important thing to avoid an accent (not that theres anything wrong with accents per se) is the stress of words combined with proper pronounciation. And here the importance is on listening carefully how people are speaking and repeat. When taught a new word or sentence, I always repeat them, especially because of the proper stress. And when people correct me, I repeat after them (you can even do it in your head if you're not comfortable saying it out loud). But this makes for decent progress.

My native language is Malayalam. It is a South-Indian language, which is usually considered as the most difficult language in India. The way we speak Malayalam is extremely different from languages like English. In Malayalam, clarity and stress are given the most importance. Since birth, we are always advised to speak each and every word clearly and rigidly. Unfortunately, it is the opposite way of speaking musical and floating languages like English.

*That's why I love Sanskrit. U can't have much difference in accents when speaking sanskrit accurately.*

Global spread of English has much more profound impact. For example, psyop would not be possible in modern warfare without popularization of English. It's also the foundation of our current world economy. I'm quite uncertain about how the popularity of English will change in the next hundreds of years or so. My guess is that it will remain as the de facto global language for as long as humanity exists. Maybe it will evolve, but it will still be the origin of the global common language thanks to UK, ships/trade, and industrialization.

My mother tongue is Spanish (I'm mexican) and I once traveled to the U.S to meet for the first time some relatives from there. On of my cousins from there is married to a Sweden woman. Obviously I could only communicate with her in English. The funny thing is that I understood way better her accent than my cousin's. My cousin's native language is English, he even speaks better English than Spanish, but it really amazed me the fact that it was easier for me to understand his wife just because of her accent.

It helps if the Spaniards spoke Spanish. None that I know do! Greetings from Aragon 😂

Stop attacking Indian media Firstpost. Firstpost has more credibility then you will even have.

😂 I learnt more in those 3 minutes than I did in 15 years of language class in school 🙈💡

you have an accent in every language.

The algorithm has blown me away by suggesting this video. Nice going, mister algorithm.

I’m peruvian, I speak Spanish and I learned English while living in Peru. I have lived 2 years in Italy and I moved to France 22 years ago and now my English have a Spanish/French accent, my Italian has a French accent too and my French has a little accent… the Frenchs always ask me if I’m Italian! 😂 What a MESS !

I am German and I'd say I am fluent in English and I could speak with a British, American or even Australian accent, but I choose to keep my German accent, because I feel weird when I try to imitate a native accent because you are picking the distinct sounds of a particular accent that sound weird or unnatural for my German ear and that always feels like I am making fun of other people's language. Even though it might not be a problem for other persons, it's just uncomfortable for me.

dude, even you have an accent in a local language. ask UK people if you don't believe. accent so different, they sometimes can't understand each other 😁

At the very least, I now grasp the concept of leverage. Creating

A difficult side of learning a language is speaking out of synch with your own natural rhythm... consonants and vowels spoken at different intervals of your breathig rhythm... worst still is when you have to link words to make you sound natural.. .when you try to do that forcebly you may end up with a total different word you never intended to while just trying to link simple words.. lol

I learned many years ago in a college linguistics class that people’s tongues actually develop a certain shape based on the accent they grew up with, and that’s why we have a particular accent that is hard to change. I’m not sure if that’s still a prevailing theory though. I feel like there has to be more to it than just paying attention to stress and intonation, because there are plenty of people who try very hard to lose their native accents and just can’t do it.

Not always the case though, some people are far better at imitating accents than others. My husband and I generally have little accent in our non native languages, and it puzzles me why people have such strong accents in foreign languages when it’s clearly obviously not correct.

Just a small mistake when it comes to French, our language doesn't have stress at the end syllable of every word, if there's one i'ts at the end of of a full sentence (and barely noticeable), we might not have lexical stress at all That's mostly why stress is so hard to learn for French speakers, we don't simply have to learn a new stress pattern, we have to learn that stress exist at all, it's a foreign concept to us (except if you're a linguist or really into language), even after a decade of using english almost everyday, I still can't really tell where is the stress in any word, because the concept still feels strange to me

Native English speakers have funny regional accents. In fact, speakers of any language have the own accents. Fancy.

Oh now I get it! So the reason why foreigners have various English accents is because of 1. The way they were taught to pronounce in their own language 2. Stress on certain vowels and consonants

You also have an accent when you speak your own language. It may be the most standard and accepted in your culture, but it's still an accent Regarding the Mbapé thing: you even do this with your own historic figures: Case in point: Knut...

My mother tougue is Ukrainian but the language I use most is English as I grew up in Ireland. I find myself sometimes speaking English with an accent out of no where if i haven't spoken it on that particular day. Usually at work due to me working with Ukrainians so I spend most of the day speaking in Ukrianian. Due to this I start trying to speak English as it was Ukrainian. Then stopping myself and quite literally freezing up in my head because I can't speak normally with my Cork Accent. I do not have this issue when I switch over from Polish though most likely due to learning later on when I was older. Now I understand how to explain this issue when it happens.

I'd say the most distinct thing about languages is how to prononce "R/р"-sound. Probably every language has its own "flavor" about it.

I'm glad pronunciation, stress and rhythm are not taught. I love to hear people speaking with different accents.

Now I want to hear Arnold Schwarzenegger minimize his Austrian accent and really try an american accent.

Interesting. I always thought it had to do with phonemes being pronounced differently. The same way that visually, we are able to distinguish different fonts. I think perfectly replicating a native accent is a Herculean task. It might be more labor-effective to get just close enough 😅

I speak Spanish (mother tongue), English and French but I've been living in France for the past 9 years. I learned English before learning French but now I have a French accent when I speak English, it's so weird, haha, people must think I do it on purpose or something but it just comes out like that naturally. My theory is because the foreign language I speak the most is French, so my brain goes on French mode more easily. I'm also learning Italian and instead of going to the Spanish intonation which is more similar to Italian I go with the French one. I gues it has become such a big part of my life that it's taking over, I kind of like and hate it at the same time.

Here's a polyglot. Usually, people don't immediately guess that I'm Italian until I say my name or birthplace. At least in English, my accent is neutral enough to confuse most foreigners (I've been called German, Irish, Scandinavian or even Russian). In German, I still retain my Romance pitch, but I'm usually mistaken for a Romanian or a Frenchman. In Russian, people tend to say I sound like a Western European, but that's it (if it has any meaning in the first place). In Serbo-Croatian, my newest foreign language, my accent was at first blatantly Russian, but it slowly became more and more Italian over time. At any rate, my accent has never caused problems so far, to the point that I can converse with native speakers for hours.

Another problem is that when you learn a foreign language, you don't know where you're making the mistakes

A part of the problem also is that we dwell on the written form too much in the foreign language. This is because we learn the written language and not how it sounds first unlike the natives.

I am bilingual in English and mathematics. My brother, who is 6 years older, is multilingual in English, C++, Java, Python, scripting languages.

I know using the aspirated plosive "P" as an example was just that - an example - but a *much* bigger accent problem for English to French would be VOWELS and, like the video said, prosody.

After 40 years living in German it seems I have a German accent now when speaking my mother tongue !

Great video!! I will consider showing it to my childiren.

It's easy for most Brits to communicate abroad. Just SHOUT LOUDER....😀

In Brazilian Portuguese we don't have syllables that ends on a consonant other than L, M, N, R or S. It means that we tend to add a vowel sound to English words that ends on a consonant. Like, "internet" is often pronounced \interne tchi\, where the final T is pronounced as Ti. "Facebook " is often pronounced \feicibuki\ sometimes with a hard K in the end, totally different from what a native speaker would expect. Also, English has 20 vowels sounds. Portuguese has only 7 or so. It is often difficult to know what is the right way to pronounce something. On the other hand Portuguese has nasal sounds that we don't find in English, making it difficult for non native speakers to pronounce words like "mãe" (mother), "pão" (bread), or "chão" (floor). I love the ideia that we have accents, it is part of our own identity

But I learned all the sounds of English and I still have an accent. I also learned the stress and everything else.

As a native English speaker who has studied many other languages and speaks Spanish the best of all the languages I've learned, properly rolling my R has been the absolute most difficult thing I've ever tried to accomplish. Despite being able to roll my Rs briefly, I cannot sustain a smooth R roll and when saying words like "Carro" it sounds more like "cardo" even though I do technically roll my R, I just can't lose the stiff English tongue. Thank goodness for Chinese

In Uruguay people learn British English instead of American English, so people here speaks so British.

How P is different in those two examples (English/French)? I'm a native (Brazilian) Portuguese speaker and fluent in English and, to me, they sound the same. My method for trying them was typing them on Google Translator, selecting the language and clicking on Play 😀 Sorry if that's not OK... And one curious thing we are taught when learning Portuguese: there is only one stress syllable on every word and there are diacritics to boot. I never ever thought that in English there could be a primary stress and a secondary stress. Really interesting short video.

Languages are for communication somebody told me, if you see people who speak English have different accents, that's their identity...

Thank you, Colin Firth.

"If stress and rhythm were better taught"... Easier said than done. At least in a normal school context, many students are not very receptive to phonetics. Most of them just find it boring.

A very well made linguistic video ❤❤

The short answer? Because you're not pronouncing words properly. An 'accent' is simply a particular way words are pronounced. When someone normally speaks another language and is learning a completely different one... They'll have an accent, but only if they don't learn how letters and words are pronounced in the language. A basic example is someone that speaks English, trying to talk in Spanish. If someone that speaks English was ignorant to Spanish pronunciation, they'd say 'hola' as the letter o (as pronounced in English, not Spanish), then -la. More like 'oh-luh'. This is an accent, whether American, British, Australian, Canadian or Kiwi. It's still an accent and in short, is the butchering of a language. When one learns a language and bothers to learn actual pronunciation, they should ultimately sound exactly like a native speaker, no one would know. In this case, it would be achieved simply by pronouncing 'hola' the way it would be in Spanish. A Spanish 'o' sound (silent h as they're not pronounced in Spanish), then -luh. There. No more 'accent' other than a Spanish speaking one. When learning other languages, we have the benefit of getting to choose the accent we want in that language, because we weren't raised into one. This is why training an accent in another language is MUCH easier than training another one within a language.