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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Accents happen because of speakers using word stress, pronunciations etc. from their first language. Russian-English is a very good example. Native Russian speakers often use the hard or soft sounds from Russian to pronounce English words, despite the fact English doesn’t have these specific hard or soft sounds. It happens more if you learned the language as an adult. If you are essentially bilingual and started learning the second language as a toddler by listening to native speakers, you will have developed the manner of speaking of native speakers – word order, word stress, mannerisms, sounds, etc. Speaking is just emulation of sounds you have heard others say, really.
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