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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It’s not just that certain sounds don’t exist (though that is one major issue). Some sounds that exist in both languages at least approximately may also be pronounced subtly differently, or may be more or less likely to be used in specific contexts.
And, as you touched upon, different languages also have different patterns of stress, pitch and intonation when speaking.
Most formal language learning tries to teach speaking with a native-like accent in order to account for these differences, but as you’ve learned yourself, this is actually quite hard to manage with every variable that can differ between languages, and the common types of differences that aren’t easy to get rid of generally wind up being the markers of a specific foreign accent when a language is spoken by a non-native.
There’s also a further complicating factor illustrated by your example of the Indian accent, in that India has a fairly large English-speaking population, and the English that is spoken there has been influenced by the other languages in the region, but has effectively become its own variant of English that is used even by native speakers or people who are quite providence with English.
Ultimately, accents exist because even if you know and make an effort to try to modify your native speech patterns, it’s very difficult to do, like a right-handed person trying to learn to write left-handed. Some people will be very successful at it, but most people are not going to be able to match the level of precision they have with their dominant hand, nor speak with an accent that perfectly matches all the various inflections of a native speaker, even if they try to.
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