If English is not your native tongue, and yet you’ve managed to obtain a perfect British accent, would you appear as a fake/unoriginal person? If you had never lived in England of course.
I’m asking this because it appears that there’s some kind of a preset “law” that states that non native English speakers are to aim towards an American accent. Your fellow non-native English speaking friends/classmates would inevitably note out your accent, and mention your failure to apply the “preset law” on yourself. I personally do not care about this, and would gladly overlook it, but what I am yet to find out is how native speakers of English would view such a person, how would YOU?
Would you think of him as an “impersonator” ? A wannabe British/Irish/whatever ?
I do expect to be engulfed with questions upon realizing that I’m an Arab who has never stepped foot in an English speaking country, but what about after that “realization” ?
I would say the opposite , when I see middle eastern people speaking with a british accent I think they sound very educated. See its not the Limey’s accent that makes them cun** its their personalities.
I don’t think any native speaker would have an issue with a British accent coming out from you because if your accent is perfect, they are just going to assume you are British. A second generation immigrant, perhaps.
I have never heard of this preset law. Or assumed that it is expected of me. If anything, it’s the other way round. So far I have met more than one person who said British English is the real English. Eeww, puh-lease.
I found it interesting that your perception is “that there’s some kind of a preset “law” that states that non native English speakers are to aim towards an American accent”. When I was teaching ESL in Germany, I was often confronted with the “opposite” perception – i.e. that there’s some kind of preset “law” that states that non-native English speakers should aim for a British accent, and that having an American accent is somehow “inferior”.
My personal opinion is that very few non-native speakers ever actually achieve a “perfect” British or American accent. One reason is that there are a number of different American and British accents. For example, if I visit Alabama, the people who live there will instantly be able to identify the fact that I am not a native of Alabama. They will know that the minute I utter my first sentence. :lol: Another reason is that a majority of non-native speakers of English are never able to completely eliminate the effect that their native language has on their English pronunciation.
It really doesn’t matter much which accent you focus on. What matters most is that your pronunciation is clear and understandable.
Global, I’d sure like to know where there is a “preset law” that says people should aim toward an American accent. Where are you? Certainly in the US, people don’t care that much about it.
That said, foreigners who have a perfect, extremely aristocratic sounding British accent can be comical to us, especially if they make a grammar or vocabulary mistake from time to time. (Watch the old movie “My Fair Lady” and notice the comedy scene in which Eliza Doolittle has mastered an upper-class British accent but not the vocabulary yet.) However, even British people with that extremely aristocratic speech are funny to us. But if the person has an ordinary British accent of some kind, people in the US don’t really care.
However, keep in mind that a lot of foreigners who claim to have a British or American accent don’t really have either one! They have some kind of foreign accent that is influenced by British or American speech, but they could never be mistaken for British or American. A lot of Germans think they have a British accent, but they really have a German accent. A lot of Iraqis think they have an American accent, but they really have an Iraqi accent. It is EXTREMELY rare to find a non-native speaker who has a British or American accent, but it’s not uncommon to find a non-native speaker who only THINKS he has one of those accents.
I direct my post at Amy and Jamie in particular, but I am of course happy to learn what others think, too. Both of you just made the point, and you have done so before, that few non-native speakers of English are able to speak English with a perfectly native-sounding accent. What I would like to know is what there is that makes the German who claims to speak with a British accent sound German and the Iraqi who claims to speak American-accented English sound Iraqi. What kind of “errors” do these people make?
The German uses pure /e/ and /o/, or if they are not pure, the tongue positions are wrong. The German still devoices word-final voiced consonants. He doesn’t pronounce /dʒ/ quite right, and his tongue position is wrong for /r/. These are just a few of the problems. He thinks that because he doesn’t pronounce his word-final or preconsonantal /r/, and that he says things like [daɪrekʃən] (which sounds to Americans like a circus ringmaster’s pronunciation), that he is speaking with a “British” accent, but he isn’t.
The Iraqi pronounces /r/ as an alveolar tap instead of a retroflex approximant. He will often pronounce /ɛ/ as something close to /ʌ/. Often he pronounces certain words, like “cellphone” in eccentric ways that only Iraqi immigrants pronounce them. He cannot deal with certain consonant clusters, so a word like “screen” will come out as [səkɾin] or “English” as [ɪŋɡəlɪʃ]. However, because of a widely held belief among Iraqis – especially Chaldeans – that their language “has all the sounds”, they will tell you in a heavy Iraqi accent that Iraqis speaking [ɪŋɡəlɪʃ] have no foreign accent at all and pronounce “exactly [ɛkəzækli] like Americans [ɛmɛɾɪkanz].”
Here are a couple of pronunciation difficulties that spring to mind regarding German speakers of English:
mispronunciation of the “hard G” at the end of a word (too much like a K), especially with a short rather than a long vowel
mispronunciation of various vowels sounds – I remember one student particularly well who always sounded like he was talking about “bogs” when referring to “bugs”. He managed to get the G pretty close to right, but annihilated the U.
mispronunciation of ‘th’ (pronounced as S, F, D or T instead)
mispronunciation of V (mispronounced like F)
difficulty with R (doesn’t sound British or American, but rather German)
Of course, it’s not only pronunciation that comes into play. For example, Germans tend to simply say “or” instead of using a normal English tag question. That comes directly from German:
She’s really beautiful, or?
I’m sure Jamie can probably add some other things about German speakers of English. I have no idea which pronunciation difficulties tend to be typical for Iraqi speakers of English.
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People who pronounce the language accurately may still sound foreign to some people. In order to sound like a native speaker you will have to learn about intonation and rhythm. This is why even fairly advanced students of phonetics have a hard time speaking other languages without a noticeable foreign accent.
Jamie, as a trained phonetician, do you think the training you have received has aided you in acquiring the pronunciation of Mexican Spanish, German, and Czech?
I too have not heard of this idea of a ‘preset law’ concerning accents. I agree with others that clear communication is the name of the game and the accent is in a sense irrelevant. In the area in the UK where I live there is such a hotch potch of accents that whether there is a tinge of English or American in the accent doesn’t bother most people. We all have an unpleasant characteristic within us that pops up occasionally when we have a quiet laugh at hearing ‘our’ language whatever it is, spoken by someone who isn’t a native speaker of ‘our’ language. I suppose those who struggle to ape an English accent in order to ‘fool’ people that they are English seem a little sad to me if that really is their actual intention. This is in a way rather like when, as Jamie has already mentioned, in Shaw’s play Pygmalion, a certain Professor Higgins sets out to take a relatively poor flower girl (this would be a girl selling flowers in the streets of fashionable London in the early 20th century) and betting that he could launch her into high society by teaching her to speak (to adopt EU’s favourite comparison) like a duchess. But if that is your game and quite honestly I don’t see the point of it, it isn’t the accent that gives you away but the use of language and in particular of idiom. These very often strike the wrong note. I have worked with and met for example, Germans who have brilliantly convincing accents but sometimes misfire, as it were, with the use of words and expressions. I hasten to add none of these guys has had the intention to ‘fool’. They were just very good practitioners of English. I was reminded of this ‘misuse’ when I heard a programme on BBC radio last week when I heard someone being interviewed. This man was born Claus Leopold Octavio Ascher who had left Germany during the Nazi period shortly after his father had been sent to a concentration camp because he had regularly shown his contempt for Hitler. Claus eventually joined the British army and ended up fighting his fellow countrymen in the second world war. He changed his name to Colin Anson and has subsequently resided in the UK. Now well over 80 years old with his wife (who is described by him as his ‘child bride’ as she is some three years younger) he speaks English perfectly with an accent that sits well with an educated man of his age. Although he has clearly no intention to fool anyone that English isn’t his first language, there are traces that point towards this in his use of certain expressions that fall a tad uneasily on the ear of the native speaker. It is very difficult to pinpoint this occasionally uneasy usage.
I trust EU will not be offended if I pick on some examples that you have used in postings while at the same time applauding your accomplished use of the written language. As for your accent of course I can’t comment. So here goes:
Two examples only - have a difficult time to me ‘hard’ seems the appropriate adjective. There are two expressions: ‘have a difficult time’ indicates having all sorts of problems to cope with in life. ‘Have a hard time’ refers mostly to one particular problem/struggling with that problem.
has aided you to me the word needed is ‘helped’ . ‘Aid’ is much more giving moral support when used as a verb.
Again there is no criticism implied here. These are just two small examples indicating to me, at least, that the writer isn’t a native.
I still think the most obvious giveaway is the foreign accent. As for the two examples you have quoted, I am sorry to say that I will have to disagree after having used my expressions as search strings in English-language corpora as it is not the case that I don’t get any relevant concordances. Your average native listener is unlikely to notice very occasional slips of the kind you describe.
Actually, with me the whole thing is backwards. Beginning as a small child, I could mimic almost anyone’s accent, as long as I didn’t hear the person every day. Somehow, in high school, I picked up German with what I was told was a completely native accent, and it must have been true, because it caused occasional confusion in people when I was in Germany.
In high school I tried to teach myself various unusual languages from “Teach Yourself” books, but I mainly just succeeded in learning IPA.
I don’t think training in phonetics and phonology have made me more able to pronounce things than I was before, because I could pretty much pronounce anything when I started. It did NOT help me at all with certain sounds, such as a couple of weird pronunciations of /i/ that I hear in Swedish. I just can’t figure out how the Swedes’ mouths form them, and I can’t find a reference to explain it. I also can’t pronounce the consonant that sounds like a combination of [ʃ] and at the beginning of Swedish words like sjukhus.
I have been told I have “no accent” in German, French, Mexican Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Czech, but there are times when I hear that I have one. If a communication task leaves me enough free brain space to concentrate on pronunciation in addition to my message, then my pronunciation is liable to be “native-like”, but if I have to concentrate very hard on what I’m trying to tell someone, I can hear that I get a slight accent. And the less I know of a language, the more likely I am to have “native” pronunciation.
If you disagree, why call them ‘slips’? I can’t see how you can possibly distinguish between word groups quoted and your use of them in your sentences.
Are you familiar with corpus linguistics? I think the main point is that some sentences are accurate, some collocations possible, while others are not. Unusual collocations are not too uncommon in native written English.
How well do foreign phoneticians pronounce English, in your experience? How long did you talk to people in the foreign languages you mentioned before the natives noticed you were not a native speaker?
Why not concentrate on the bright side of things? You’re written command of the English language is excellent and almost native speaker-like, you have an accent that would arouse envy with most Duchesses in the 1930s, and your word choice is living proof for long and successful years of studying the English language. Why this obsession with perfection?
It could be worse, you could (like me) forever be afflicted with an intonation in your second native language that has every native speaker of this language tell you that you are not really a native speaker. That’s what most Germans I talk to tell me, and it gets worse when they then change to English and don’t understand you anymore. Very awkward, particularly in restaurants when you order a rare steak with chips and you then get it done with a bag of crisps. And then you could (like me) work in this country and speak to people who have trouble understanding an Irish accent, so you end up losing it. And then, one Sunday in a pub, you meet (like me 2 weeks ago) somebody who went to the same primary school like you and doesn’t recognise your accent but mistakes it for an English accent. Admittedly, that hurt for a little while, but after the second pint it was alright again.
Because there is and will always be room for improvement. I believe this applies to each one of us.
I do not like the term ‘near-native’ because to me this implies that the native speaker’s command of the language is somehow more sophisticated than that of a highly proficient non-native speaker, which is not always the case. Most of the native speakers I work with frequently misspell words, even fairly simple words, and I honestly don’t get why these mistakes should be seen as less grave than occasional unusual collocations coming from a non-native speaker. Note that I wrote ‘unusual’, not ‘erroneous’.
I know exactly what you are talking about, and I think it is mostly monolingual native speakers who have lead all their lives in their native country who actually speak a very “pure” form of the language, although even they are likely to make mistakes from time to time. I can speak no language in an absolutely “pure” form, yet people often regard me as a highly articulate speaker of the languages I am proficient in and for me this is almost enough.
Alan’s comments on language sometimes annoy me because I sense that he is not a linguist in the sense that some of the other posters here are. He does not know phonetic symbols, nor does he seem very familiar with corpus linguistics, yet he claims to be a highly qualified ESL professional. How can you be a qualified ESL professional without knowing English phonetics? Alan’s grasp on linguistic theory in general does not seem that great either.
Maybe so, but we linguists get in your craw also, particularly when we agree with Alan or have the audacity to point out that you’ve made a mistake, no matter how minor.
Do you know this? I have never seen any indication that he doesn’t know phonetic symbols. Certainly an educated anglophone of his generation would have been taught phonetic symbols at about the age of 9, as I was. If he didn’t know phonetic symbols, he couldn’t use a dictionary, which he obviously can.
I see that corpus linguistics is a new kick you’re on. Corpus linguistic data is only as good as the judgment of the person using it, and it can be used to very screwy effect, as when a corpus-based Oxford learner’s dictionary marks words as basic as “grape” as not being essential, simply because they have lower frequency than others.
He OBVIOUSLY IS a highly qualified ESL professional!
You’re displaying a somewhat childish egotism over linguistic disciplines you’ve got relatively short acquaintance with. Then you use your new knowledge to try to beat up a highly qualified ESL professional who has certainly forgotten more than you or I have ever learned. You just make yourself look smaller and him look like a Leviathan.
There’s an old Woody Allen movie in which he stands in line at the movies and has to endure the under-informed, misinformed and malformed analysis of the theories of Marshall McLuhan that some regular guy is trying to impress his date with. The guy’s self-important blabber gets so unbearable that Woody Allen pulls Marshall McLuhan out from somewhere, and McLuhan berates the guy for knowing “NOTHING about my work!” Every time you do this with someone like John Wells, I realize I could probably pull the same stunt Woody pulled in the movie. Believe me, you make it very tempting.
