Speaking Spanish my accent isn’t specific, although I avoid the Mexican style accentuation despite most of the Spanish speakers here being Mexican. I also can pronounce it rather well, but what should be a proper intervocalic b or v ends up as the same v sound as in English.

I came across this blog while I was wondering: Why do accents disappear when a person starts to sing??

~N

As for me, I lost my southern accent much faster than the rest of my family when we moved to California, and now speak, more or less, with a Standard American accent. However, it has been pointed out to me that if I am around other Southerners, drunk, or in an otherwise altered state, my accent comes back fast and strong, something I don’t really notice. Also, I’m a natural mimic, and I have the unusual talent of being able to speak other languages with (in most cases) no trace of an accent, leading many people to believe that whichever language I may be speaking in is my primary one. I also do it subconsciously: when I’ve been speaking Hindi, or simply talking to Indians, I tend to speak English with that oh-so-distinctive South Asian lilt, and the same goes for Farsi, or French, or Spanish.

sometimes it doesn’t go over so well.

I came across your blog while surfing and was fascinated. I love accents and languages as well. I’m a Malaysian who studied English as a 2nd language, then went to study in the UK as a teenager, did 1 year of Japanese in Japan and went to university in the US. I speak (Malaysian) English mostly at home with what can be termed as an “international accent”. Going to Japan to study Japanese completely destroyed part of my typically British pronunciation, which is understandable since it was learnt anyway and not “natural”.

Here in Malaysia people tend to think my accent is more British than anything else; in the US, the Americans think I sound mostly British as well while in the UK the Brits think I sound quite American with Asian and British influences. It’s fun!

I also speak Japanese with a Malay accent and Malay with a “western” accent as well as a smattering of Cantonese with an unidentifiable accent! I read basic French and sometimes ventured to speak it in an accent and grammar that completely horrifies most French speakers! He!he!

My next venture is German - starting in July. Wish me luck!

“I think the ability to convincingly switch accents within one’s native language is a direct indicator of how good your pronunciation is going to be in L2 (+).”

This has to be spot on. Most people aren´t prepared to take the risk of speaking funny. It just feels artificial. But every word I utter in Spanish is artificial, and 5 years ago I couldn´t even ask for a water in a restaurant (I was in Majorca exactly 5 years ago). Now I teach in Spanish and speak it more than I speak English.

Some observations on accents:

(1) When people say that you have a particular accent in a learnt L2 they probably mean that you have picked up a few of the more obvious features, not that anyone from the area would mistake you as local.

It´s a hard truth, as we´d all love to think that we had “got it”, but I know from imitating accents in English that “getting it” is very, very difficult and takes a long time. People are often very generous, and we say that someone has an American accent because they say “Gawd” and not “God”, even though they are clearly not American. I was talking to someone the other night on the phone who didn´t know me and the part of the conversation went:

“You´re not chilean are you?”
-No.
Where are you from?
Guess [NB, I am just plain difficult like that and don´t like telling people]
Don´t know. Peru? Central America? I don´t know.

When I was in Central America no-one thought I sounded Central American. But people say that to me quite a bit down here. Chileans have no idea what the Central American accent is really like, but can tell (a) I´m not Chilean or Argentinean (b) I speak with an educated accent. If I´m visible they can also tell (c) I´m white.

(2) If you have a mixed or neutral accent, what people hear often reflects more about them than it does about your accent.

Apparently my accent tends to be the “norma culta” of Andean Spanish, with overtones of Central America (I listen to Colombian Radio hours a day and simply love the accents on it). However, my Colombian friend says I sound Spanish (she is from the coast). No Spaniard would ever think I was Spanish. I just have a tendency towards an apico-alveolar /s/, which is typical of central and north Spain (and actually a few parts of Colombia and Peru). This is a typical overcompensation done by people who grew up in an /s/ dropping environment and then want to speak “properly” and I have heard the same thing in a Colombian and a Panamanian.

(3) People´s perception of your accent depends on nonlinguistic factors.

In Guatemala my teacher did an experiment in shop and asked the lady in it where she though I was from. She said American, not because I sound it, but because most Guatemalans in the area I was in are indigenous. She knew someone who was married to an American who looked a bit like me. I don´t look like I could be Latin to them. In Spain I was often told I looked Spanish, and Chileans and Argentinans wouldn´t think about it twice. At least not from my skin colour. But the way you move, what you wear, how you wear it and so on all funnel into people´s perception of your accent (which is why phone is quite fun as they loose all of that).

My French accent is still just as Parisian as it always was. I never got a Canadian one.

When I was 16, my family moved to central Virginia. Six months later I went back to NY for the summer, and already I could hear a difference, not just in my “a” but in “au” diphthongs (”downtown”). I had definitely picked up a partial southern accent, and it has by now (almost 40 years later) completely replaced my original one.