{"id":457,"date":"2007-08-06T17:26:16","date_gmt":"2007-08-06T16:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/06\/foreign-accents\/"},"modified":"2007-08-06T17:26:16","modified_gmt":"2007-08-06T16:26:16","slug":"foreign-accents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=457","title":{"rendered":"Speaking with a foreign accent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came across an interesting post today over on <a href=\"http:\/\/david-crystal.blogspot.com\/2007\/07\/on-sounding-british-not.html\">David Crystal&#8217;s blog<\/a> about foreign accents. He believes that as long as other people can understand what you say in a foreign language, it doesn&#8217;t really matter if you speak it with a non-native accent. In fact your accent conveys your identity. He states that &#8220;it is very rare indeed for someone to develop a phonetic ability to the extent that their foreign origins are totally masked&#8221;, and that the only people who would really need to do so are spies.<\/p>\n<p>It is indeed very difficult to speak a foreign language with completely native pronunciation and intonation, unless you acquire it at a young age. Having a training in phonetics certainly helps, as does prolonged immersion in the language. It also helps if you&#8217;re a good mimic.<\/p>\n<p>I do my best to acquire as near a native accent as possible in the languages I&#8217;m learning, and my accent tends to improve if I spend a lot of time speaking those languages with native speakers. When people ask me which part of their country I&#8217;m from, or assume I&#8217;m from a neighbouring country where the same language is spoken, I know I&#8217;m one the right track.<\/p>\n<p>Do you think it matters if you have a &#8216;foreign&#8217; accent when speaking another language?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across an interesting post today over on David Crystal&#8217;s blog about foreign accents. He believes that as long as other people can understand what you say in a foreign language, it doesn&#8217;t really matter if you speak it with a non-native accent. In fact your accent conveys your identity. He states that &#8220;it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-language-learning","category-pronunciation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}