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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You also have a strong accent – it’s called the American accent. And not even an American accent, but an accent from the part of the US you grew up in.
If you are an American, then you have plenty of examples in English of differences in accent. A person from the Georgia mountains is going to sound different than a person from Brooklyn, New York. A person from Minnesota sounds different than a person from Southern New Mexico.
The “redneck” stereotypical accent is commonly made fun of all over the English speaking world.
As for “The Spanish accent” I assume you mean a person specifically from Spain? Even within Spain, I’m sure there are distinct accents just as there are in the USA- A Basque person is going to sound different than a person from Madrid.
There are several ways of speaking a language and they are equally good, be it indian, british, australian or US English. The same happens with Spanish (Spain and Latin American version) and I suspect every big established language. And its bative speakers will always feel they are speaking the natural version of ot against everyone else.
Learning a language as an adult without accents is literally impossible. No matter how good you get you will still have a faint accent because no matter how you try to mimic the original pronunciation you are not capable anymore (as a toddler is) to hear and replicate the fine sound variations.
However, despite it being impossible to speak accent-free, it is very advised to at least improve your accent to a point where what you say is comprehensive to native speakers, such as rolling your R and so on in Spanish.
stressed in syllables are distributed differently in different languages. english is a stressed based language, meaning that there are regular stressed (intonated, more emphasis) intervals, while the unstressed parts lose a bit of emphasis (to pay peter you must take from paul…when we stress the second A on banana, we also diminish the first and last “a”). spanish is a syllabic based language, where stress is generally distributed equally and then when its not, they indicate stress with an accent mark.
in english, if you wanted to use accent marks, they would be EVERYWHERE. so when people come from syllabic based languages and learn english, they have to also learn that stress is NOT distributed equally. this is incredibly difficult part of learning english. in english, stress follows these give/take trend inside of words with syllables, as well as inside of phrases/sentences. in english, we dont typically stress articles, prepositions, the “to” in infinitives, most pronouns nor conjunctions. so this one characteristic of english can translate, pun intended, into a wide variety of strange sounds for a native speaker because the second language speaker is really struggling to get the rhythm of english stress distribution.
to the other differences…think of languages like gyms….each gym has a different set of machines to exercise…when you learn a new language, you are exercising different muscles using different machines. your tongue is a muscle. when you grow up learing your native language, your tongue exercises the same muscles and your ears are trained to those sounds and nuances. when you start speaking a new language, you are having to force your tongue to do things it hasnt been doing for its whole existence. this creates small nuanced deviations from the sound of a native speaker.
You are looking at it from a native speaker. Ask British people what stands out in an American accent and you will realize that we do stress things in a very particular way. Imagine learning English from a completely different language family while trying to sound American.
You may be fluent in English but stressing English like a British person is not natural for you even if it doesn’t have rolling “R’s”. Imagine someone learning English from a totally different language family.
I’m a former Spanish teacher. There are both similar/different sounds made in different languages. In Spanish, all the sounds made in the language are also used in English, with maybe the exception of rolling the R’s. In English, there are quite a few sounds that are not commonly made in Spanish. So it stands to reason that if you grew up speaking English, you’ll have an easier time learning the accent than someone who grew up speaking Spanish who learned English. An added difficulty is the difference in syntax, (the way/order of words in which sentences are constructed), and also English grammar and spelling follow less-consistent rules, and in Spanish they’re quite consistent and intuitive. The spelling is also phonetic. so for native English speakers, spanish is a pretty accessible language to learn. It already all makes sense. English learners have a much greater difficulty because English is more complicated, less consistent, and all the grammar rules have exceptions.
Other languages can also have certain inflections or emphases that are necessary to communicate accurately in their native tongue, but aren’t necessary in English. They may retain the emphasis they put on the word (in their native tongue) to the translated word in English, because it contextually makes sense to them. It feels necessary when speaking.
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.”
Some languages are more similar than others, and have more sounds in common, similar stress patterns, etc., which can make it easier to learn the new language.
India is kind of a unique case, in that India has hundreds of languages and uses English as its official language, so while any educated person in India will speak English fluently, it’s likely not their first language *and* they may not have had much exposure to native speakers outside media, even though they’ll use the language regularly. The goal isn’t to have English that blends in with Brits, Americans, Aussies, etc., but to speak English that your coworker (whose native language may be different than yours) can understand. With that said, if you speak to *upper class* Indians, they will likely have an accent that sounds much more British.
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