So I was born and brought up in India but have been studying abroad for almost two years now and my accent has changed significantly. Everyone I know from home has noticed it yet I don’t think it has changed all that much. I know people who’ve lived abroad for almost 20 years without having any changes in their accents. I’m 19 at moment could it be possible due to my age I’m more prone to subconsciously picking up words I hear around me?
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All human spoken languages are composed of simple sounds called phonemes. These are like the primary colors of speech, the number of possible phonemes is only limited by the different sounds the human mouth and vocal cords can produce. Any one particular language does not use all of the phonemes. As a baby, you learn the phonemes which your language uses, but you don’t learn the ones that aren’t used. For the rest of your life, you will have difficulty making these other phonemes. This is the major cause of accents, struggling with differences in phonemes between languages. One classic example is that some eastern Asian languages do not use the “ell” phoneme. When people who grew up speaking these languages attempt to speak english, they have difficulty pronouncing words with the “ell” sounds properly.
Other difference which contribute to accents are difference in cadence and pitch between languages. Some languages are spoken with a lower pitched voice (like French) while other languages are spoken with a high pitch, or with a widely varying pitch. When someone speaks a foreign language, they may use their native instincts relating to pitch, which make it sound odd to native speakers. Cadence has to do with how rapidly words are spoken. Some languages use rapid sounds, while other use longer sounds, and still others use a combination of the two. If you use a non-native cadence when speaking, it will sound foreign.
Grammar is different between languages. When learning a new language, it is often easiest to speak your native language, just using foreign words. This can usually be understood by others, but sounds very weird. One example would be French, where adjectives are usually placed after words. A native French speaker might say in English “I have a car red”, whereas a native english speaker would say “I have a red car”.
Lastly, there are idioms and slang. Idioms are small sayings or speech patterns which don’t really make sense, but that all native speakers have learned to understand without thinking about them. In english, you might say to someone “How do you do?”. This question makes no sense, if you learned english from a text book, you might respond “How do I do what?”. It takes experience to learn idioms from another language. People learning a new language may try to use idioms from their native language, or may use the new foreign idioms incorrectly.
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