I truly don’t understand accents. My only experience is as an American learning Spanish; it was stressed pretty hard to use the Spanish accent – that had at least equal weight with confugating verbs. I’m sure that my Spanish accent is absolutely crappy and I’m easily identifiable as an American, but as far as I’m aware English to Spanish stresses the accent.
What confuses me is when people from, say, India, speak English, they often have a strong accent. They stress odd syllables and pronounce letters differently than they “should.” I know it’s difficult in some cases to form sounds from another language due to them just not existing in the original language, but…like English doesn’t roll it’s Rs, yet I do when I speak Spanish (again, badly I’m sure)?
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I find that sometimes an accent is the result of people trying to speak a second language using the sounds of their primary language.
For example, take a native Chinese person speaking English trying to say the sentence “It is fine, thank you.” This sentence has a lot of sounds that don’t occur in Mandarin like the terminal s in “is” and the “th” in thank, so a Mandarin speaker may try to shoehorn it into sounds that do exist in Chinese and end up with “ee-tuh ee-suh fine, san-kuh you.” It’s hard to hear and mimic sounds that don’t exist in your native language.
On the flip side, if you have a native English speaker learning Chinese, a big thing they struggle with is the fact that Chinese is tonal; the inflection on a syllable changes it’s meaning. Many English speakers superimpose inflection from English onto Chinese words, thus having an accent and making themselves hard to understand. For example, English question sentences tend to have an upward inflection at the end; Chinese ones don’t, but English-speakers will commonly still apply this in Chinese as part of their “American accent.”
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