I had four years of intensive training in both written and spoken French and was considered to speak it on a near native level. When I joined the military my first tour of duty was, of course, Germany. I took several crash courses in spoken German so that I could travel around the country without a language barrier. As I traveled I was often teased that I was the first American they had ever met who spoke German like a native Frenchman. It was a wonderful ice breaker wherever I traveled !

Stress pattern is one of the most important aspect of an accent. I have been living in the US for 5 years now, and the stress patterns were the last thing I managed to adapt to sound kinda American. It is so important that if you do the pronunciations right but don’t get the stress & pitch right, you will never sound perfect. On the flipside, if you get the stress/pitch right and pronounce a few words the non-traditional way, you will still sound very perfect.

Interesting. I am a native Cantonese speaker. It would be in my wildest dream to imagine that Cantonese and Italian actually have something in common😅

I think there is something that should also be included in this article: you are trained to listen to the sounds of your mother tongue, so when you listen to a foreign language your brain is processing it like it would your mother tongue, i.e. you don't listen for example German like a German would, you listen to German like you were listening to your mother tongue and so you will try to speak the words you listen but they are not the exact sounds a German would hear. With exposure your brain can train itself to listen to the proper sound emphasis of the foreign language and that will enhance your accent but some people never have enough exposure. I think often the listening training is ignored when teaching languages and that is a shame.

Reasons listed: 1) Individual sounds differ between languages 2) Several sounds are not possible in some languages -> people insert/adjust the sound to fit the the rules of their own 3) Differences in stress patterns 4) Differences in intonation/language rythym

You have an accent all the time in any language, including your own.

There was way more information in this short 3-min video than I was expecting.

they REALLY gotta teach this in language classes. this stuff feels so important to me but is NEVER taught in classrooms in my experience

While at a conference in Denmark, I tried to learn some phrases in Danish - primarily "I don't speak Danish, I speak English". Everyone said I spoke with a Swedish accent. Thank you "The Swedish Chef" from Sesame Street.

Also some sounds just simply don’t exist in your target language. Many foreigners struggle with the two “TH” sounds in English whereas many anglophones struggle with the trilled “R” of Spanish.

When I first went to India, I had a hard time understanding the way many Indians spoke English. To me, the words just ran together with no particular emphasis. Over time, my brain learned how to sort it out. Once I began learning Hindi, it made sense to me why these speakers spoke English the way they did. And it was always speakers who had learned English in school, but never traveled out of the country to be exposed to native English speakers. The same would be true, I'm sure, for any language.

Am just disappointed that this video was extremely short...it was soooo engaging that I never wanted it to end❤

I’m bilingual in English and Tamil (a Dravidian language from southern India). Along the years I’ve learnt Hindi, Spanish and German to varying degrees of fluency. My struggles with these latter languages have given me new respect for people who strive to speak in languages other than own, even if their speech is heavily accented. What’s important after all is communication between different cultures, even if said communication is not perfect! 😊

This is pretty funny because I have just started learning Spanish to connect with my family from Peru and I don't want to butcher their language so I say a couple sentences in English like my dad would with his Peruvian-accent before speaking a sentence in Spanish. It really helped! But then my family in Peru mistaken me for being fluent because my accent is polished, haha. And now I understand it's due to the stress my dad put on words. How neat!

i learned a lot of languages and enjoyed doing so. i always made it a point to try to imitate the sounds and pronunciations as closely to the original as possible. people tell me i speak excellent italian and a lot of english speakers believe i am native or have been living in an english speaking country for a long time 😊 the best thing was to read texts out loud, listen carefully and try to nail the intonation 🎉

Funny, smart and -as US Americans never used to say- spot on.

This is all really interesting to know. I wish sounding like a native speaker weren't such a goal for many language learners. I think these differences are actually pretty charming and I love when I meet someone who speaks my language in a very different way.

Very true! And it’s rarely taught in language courses, let alone in schools. It’d be great to have more of these videos on specifics for different languages, at least for native English speakers. Cheers!

I'm an Indo-Mauritian My native language is french based Mauritian Creole. Learnt English and French as from age four and Hindi as from age six I've lived in France since age 19 People from the Indian Ocean, Reunionese and Malagasies, immediately identify my Mauritian accent when I'm speaking French French people mistake my accent, when I'm speaking French, for a posh British accent When speaking English, my accent isn't like the French accent at all My accent when speaking Hindi is, I guess, like any Bihari accent. I've never heard a record of it and no Indian has ever commented on it All this is very surprising because when I speak French, I don't hear my own accent. To my own ears, I have a neutral Parisian accent I don't know if it is related with accents but despite learning French since age four and listening to native French speakers on television and in real life since then, I can't pronounce the french "ar" correctly I can't say "Chartres" and "Montmartre" properly because I don't naturally open my mouth enough for the "ar" syllable I actually dreaded the prospect of working at Chartres when I received an internship offer there 😅

That was fun! Wish it was longer and more in depth. I'm sure different languages have their own idiosyncrasies beyond the few you mentioned here. Even this superficial understanding would be of benefit for people seeking to understand more about other cultures. This would be of benefit to the WORLD!

I'm Italian and I used to live in Manchester, UK. I'm not very fluent in English and my grammar isn't so accurate, but I actually can speak. Well, for some reason British people often mismatched my accent calling me a Swedish or Dutch. Very funny! My theory: Italians are usually depicted as tanned guys with black mustaches and dark eyes... but I'm pale and I've got blond hair and blue eyes. I think the sight took over the listening.

Yes yes and yes! This is one thing that I am always paying close attention to. (So far I have learned with varying degrees of fluency English, Spanish, Farsi and now Arabic as a native German-speaker). Recently I was speaking Farsi with somone (actually I learned around afghans, hence I speak more Dari) and the amazing thing was that her immediate response was that I am speaking with a Dari accent, which blew my mind. For me the most important thing to avoid an accent (not that theres anything wrong with accents per se) is the stress of words combined with proper pronounciation. And here the importance is on listening carefully how people are speaking and repeat. When taught a new word or sentence, I always repeat them, especially because of the proper stress. And when people correct me, I repeat after them (you can even do it in your head if you're not comfortable saying it out loud). But this makes for decent progress.

As someone who has a master's degree in applied languages, during my studies I learnt that the phonology of our native dialect entails a social identity. Therefore, we are hard encoded to show this identity with our phonology, in such a manner that hearing ourselves in a foreign accent seems wrong and It deters us from doing It.

Summary: Foreign accents exist because people try to speak other languages with the stresses, timings, and intonations (and sometimes grammar) of their own language. Want to sound more like a native speaker quickly? Speak their language like how they try to speak your language. Just keep in mind what dialect of their language they speak. If you want to sound from Paris, don't copy someone from Quebec City, etc.

My Dutch has a slight English accent. (Englsh is my first language) My father once joked that I speak English like a foreigner. My German friends tell me I speak German with a Dutch accent. My French friends tell me I speak French with a Dutch accent. My Thai friends tell me I speak Thai like Thai people. (I'm not entirely convinced) My Spanish friends tell me I speak Spanish like a Peruvian (that's where I learned el Castellano) I rarely speak Italian, but I rather suspect it sounds not like an Italian.

As an Art student from London, living in South Wales in the early eighties, in what used to be Monmouthshire, with a lot of other students from the west of England, I picked up a west country twank, which took weeks to disappear, when I left college and returned to London. My normal English accent is North West London middle class. So I can see how what is being spoken about could happen.

Breath control is also huge! In English (especially American English) we stereotypically let out one constant stream of air and squeak out several nasally words that run together, but in German, you use all the air in your chest to really vocalize your words, taking pauses and making several glottal stops

My mother tongue is Spanish (I'm mexican) and I once traveled to the U.S to meet for the first time some relatives from there. On of my cousins from there is married to a Sweden woman. Obviously I could only communicate with her in English. The funny thing is that I understood way better her accent than my cousin's. My cousin's native language is English, he even speaks better English than Spanish, but it really amazed me the fact that it was easier for me to understand his wife just because of her accent.

Ì think that having a foreign accent doesn't matter. What's importante is that people understand you and you understand people. I like accents.

There's nothing wrong with speaking with an accent. I find it makes people more interesting

As a scholar of Italian linguistics, allow me a correction (if it is such). Actually, Italian distinguishes length for both vowels and consonants (long and short), not only in word morphology but also and especially at the prosodic level. (Nespor, 2014). The reason why English speakers notice that syllabic homorhythm is, in my opinion, due to two main causes : 1) the fact that the stereotype of the Italian accent is actually drawn from Neapolitan, 2) the fact that an Italian locutor has a tendency not to distinguish long and short vowels in English because simply from the point of view of the Italian source phonology, English words almost never present that structure that triggers vowel elongation in Italian instead. Rather, English words invite, if anything, an Italian to double the consonant and/or add a final schewa. None of this, however, implies that Italian always has syllables of equal length, for such is only a foreign ear's impression of the Italian language.

I'm a native English speaker. My English accent is basically Southern posh with probably a hint of Canadian left over from my early childhood. I speak French with the accent of a Parisian fonctionnaire. However, my spoken French actually isn't quite fluent. I can participate perfectly well in conversation, but make lots of mistakes and often find that I lack vocabulary, which is the source of a great deal of mystification. I also speak appallingly bad German with, apparently, a Prussian accent, which I think must be the result of the war films we used to watch on Sunday afternoons at boarding school 50 years ago.

Your choice of using Kylian Mbappé as an example is very interesting, especially for the French I am. Actually, you are right, his name is pronounced "mbappé"... but many French people do not pronounce it correctly and say.... "embappé", like the English speaker. :) This comes from the fact that the Mbappé name comes from Cameroon, and like many other african names, it uses a combination of consonants at the beginning that the French language does not have. So we don't always know whether the 'M' from "Mbappé" is an independant consonant that we should spell (as if it was "M-Bappé") or if it is a combination with the following 'p' that has to be pronounced together (which, thus, is the correct way). So, sometimes we say "Embappé" whereas we are totally able to say "Mbappé". :)

Well for your information, we, french, also pronounce MBAPPE as EMBAPE because the letter M in the french alphabet is pronounced EMM

My native language is Malayalam. It is a South-Indian language, which is usually considered as the most difficult language in India. The way we speak Malayalam is extremely different from languages like English. In Malayalam, clarity and stress are given the most importance. Since birth, we are always advised to speak each and every word clearly and rigidly. Unfortunately, it is the opposite way of speaking musical and floating languages like English.

I liked this video because I'm a spanish speaker and when I speak english I have a very strong latino accent. Not as strong as Sofia Vergara though haha. 😅

YES! That's why it can help to first immerse oneself in the plain listening to a language, without intent of understanding it. Take in the rhythm, cadence and stressors, before going in for actual grammar and words. I see it like choosing and preparing the soil before actually planting the seeds which then of course need nurturing to grow. Sure plants could grow in the soil you've always used, but imagine the full potential if you chose and prepared the specific soil for the specific plant you wanna grow 🌺

Old ESL teacher here. You forgot that students tend to pick up on the accent of their teacher, I can almost always tell (with more fluent students) if their teacher was American or British. Except Scots, never heard a student end up with a Scots accent from a Scots teacher. But I have had students email after arriving in Glasgow for uni, to say, "I know they are speaking English, but I can't understand a word they are staying."

I speak 3 languages, and I don't care about my foreign accent. It's a charming ❤ I prefer don't judge just because, it's cute listening the foreign accents foreign people speaking my native language. I'm a interpreter, and communication is more important than accent. I'm leaving in US, and I'm brazilian. I never gonna be american and any point to try to looks like one 😂😂😂😂😂

The algorithm has blown me away by suggesting this video. Nice going, mister algorithm.

I'm American but speak French, Russian, some Turkish, German , Norwegian, Danish, Czech and dabbled in Arabic, Greek so my accent is interesting lol

Mainly these are the things that foreign language learners neglect when they learn a new language. If you study opera, you have learn to sound like a native in whatever language you are speaking.

This is actual a brilliant short explanation. Kudos to you

I learned many years ago in a college linguistics class that people’s tongues actually develop a certain shape based on the accent they grew up with, and that’s why we have a particular accent that is hard to change. I’m not sure if that’s still a prevailing theory though. I feel like there has to be more to it than just paying attention to stress and intonation, because there are plenty of people who try very hard to lose their native accents and just can’t do it.

I'm missing two crucial factors in this video 1 your speechmuscles are trained to pronounce certain sounds - even in your native language(s) 2 if you don't hear languages as an infant, you can lose the ability to hear that some letters are different. That's why some Anglo's have trouble distinguishing french "vous" from "vue" , or think that spanish J sounds like H - or how some Asians have trouble with R/L, B/P, K/G...

Trop cool! J'adore!

Excellent video, people tend not to talk about accent in such depth.

In Farsi, we don't have short vowels. So, for example, we pronounce pitch as peach. Probably, the most famous one is "Sun of a beach"! 😂

Thank you, Colin Firth.

Some accents do have a charm of their own!😊

Native Japanese speaker; English is my third language. I was hoping you'd go into why people can speak a nonnative language for a long time and *still* have trouble with the pronunciation like the intro seemed to promise.

Great video!! I will consider showing it to my childiren.

Oh now I get it! So the reason why foreigners have various English accents is because of 1. The way they were taught to pronounce in their own language 2. Stress on certain vowels and consonants

I live in Canada, speak 5 languages, my first language was Polish. I speak English with a slight accent. Now, I also speak Polish with a slight foreign accent. Lol...

Brilliant explanation. It's interesting, how these things are becoming quite obvious once you know about them. I haven't given this much thought before. Thank you for teaching me something new within such a short time. Three minutes well spent ❤

When I was studying in Austria, it was so interesting to hear the other students speaking German with French and Italian accents. I’m sure we all had foreign accents speaking German, but theirs were the most pronounced.

I am a native Mandarin speaker from Malaysia. My friends from China usually find my accent strange/funny. Even I try my best to speak in "standard Beijing accent", but to no avail. It's still wildly different from theirs (especially those from northern China). Nonetheless, it's COMPLETELY MUTUALLY INTELLIGIBLE as long as we speak in the standard Mandarin regardless of accents. My advice is... just make sure you pronounce clearly in the standard varieties of your target languages, accents don't really matter.

My mother tougue is Ukrainian but the language I use most is English as I grew up in Ireland. I find myself sometimes speaking English with an accent out of no where if i haven't spoken it on that particular day. Usually at work due to me working with Ukrainians so I spend most of the day speaking in Ukrianian. Due to this I start trying to speak English as it was Ukrainian. Then stopping myself and quite literally freezing up in my head because I can't speak normally with my Cork Accent. I do not have this issue when I switch over from Polish though most likely due to learning later on when I was older. Now I understand how to explain this issue when it happens.

That was both amusing and insightful!!

I began my investment journey at the age of 33, primarily through hard work and dedication. Now at the age of 38, I am thrilled to share that my passive income exceeded $100k in a single month for the first time. This success reinforces the importance of the advice mentioned earlier. It is not about achieving quick wealth, but rather ensuring long-term financial prosperity.

In my case the explanation is simple: little contact in real life with native speakers AND the fact that many times I cannot hear the difference of two different sounds so I can't even try to imitate them. Also English I think makes very little sense phonetically so I basically need to hear all the words multiple times in order to understand how they should be pronounced.

you have an accent in every language.

The editor was absolutely fighting for that paycheck.

I am a native bengali speaker from India, and even though Bengali is an Indo European language, like all other North Indian languages(Hindi, Punjabi etc), it's pronounciations of words are completely different from those languages even though most words are just the same, so the Schwa sound is not there in Bengali which is replaced with Awe sound(as in awesome) and other languages that are in Eastern part of India and the reason is the influence of sino tibetan languages(which are prevalent in north eastern regions). So, Assamese is east to Bengal and has even though it's very similar to bengali it has more sino tibetan influence, On the other hand Odia which is south of Bengal has more dravidic influence even though it's similar to Bengali. The equivalence can be found in Hindi sister languages such as Nepali which is somewhere between Hindi and Bengali and have both the schwa sound and the Awe sound. Now, if you consider the bengali language of Bangladesh, the accent has more austro asiatic influence...and you go further east towards Sylhette, Tripura and Chitagong, in addition to the austro asiatic, you also get additional sino tibetan influence and even though it's bengali, it becomes completely unintelligible. So, aforementioned Assamese or Odia is more intelligible to a Bengali speaker of Indian Bengal than the Bengali speaker of Syllhette, Tripura and Chitagong...

I taught conversational English in a European country, and when I was asked how to lose one's accent I replied "stop using the rules of your native language and listen to how the other language's natives speak theirs". Not sure if my students listened to my advice, but as I was teaching English I was also learning their language and have achieved virtually zero accent, though my vocabulary is merely adequate.

I am an American Mid Atlantic English speaker who took German language classes from middle school thru college. I have also watched 60 years worth of WW2 movies with German actors speaking English and German. When I flew back to the USA via Lufthansa, I only spoke a few polite words to the Attendant in German. She thought I was a German national and gave me the incorrect US Customs Questionaire to fill out. Ich bin ein Amerikaner.

I speak fluent Spanish and can tell when someone has a Spanish accent while speaking English lol I cant tell the country theyre from but can tell their first language is Spanish🥰

A very well made linguistic video ❤❤

When one learns a language under age of 20 the probability to have an accent in that language is very slim. The younger one is learning a new language the better one is not to have an accent. That is because the vocal cords are fully developed by age of 20. I have been told by British ppl that all of us Canadians, Australians, Americans…have an accent 😅So there!

This was a great, informative and entertaining video. Really enjoyed it! Thank you.

I LOVED THIS. Please make a longer video with more examples.

You also can have a local accent in a foreign language if you integrate and use it long enough. For instance, despite being French my mother language, I speak Spanish with an accent of Seville, which is where I learned it when I was 18. In English, however, I have no specific recognizable accent, as I learned it in many different places.

Interesting. I always thought it had to do with phonemes being pronounced differently. The same way that visually, we are able to distinguish different fonts. I think perfectly replicating a native accent is a Herculean task. It might be more labor-effective to get just close enough 😅

Native English speaker (American English), here… former Spanish and French linguist. Learned Spanish years and years before French. When I speak French, I’m told I speak with a Spanish accent and people don’t’ initially know I’m from the US.

YES! That's why it can help to first immerse oneself in the plain listening to a language, without intent of understanding it. Take in the rhythm, cadence and stressors, before going in for actual grammar and words. I see it like choosing and preparing the soil before actually planting the seeds which then of course need nurturing to grow. Sure plants could grow in the soil you've always used, but imagine the full potential if you chose and prepared the specific soil for the specific plant you wanna grow

In Brazilian Portuguese we don't have syllables that ends on a consonant other than L, M, N, R or S. It means that we tend to add a vowel sound to English words that ends on a consonant. Like, "internet" is often pronounced \interne tchi\, where the final T is pronounced as Ti. "Facebook " is often pronounced \feicibuki\ sometimes with a hard K in the end, totally different from what a native speaker would expect. Also, English has 20 vowels sounds. Portuguese has only 7 or so. It is often difficult to know what is the right way to pronounce something. On the other hand Portuguese has nasal sounds that we don't find in English, making it difficult for non native speakers to pronounce words like "mãe" (mother), "pão" (bread), or "chão" (floor). I love the ideia that we have accents, it is part of our own identity

Amazing video! Thank you!

This is delightful 😊

I always thought of this!

Here's a polyglot. Usually, people don't immediately guess that I'm Italian until I say my name or birthplace. At least in English, my accent is neutral enough to confuse most foreigners (I've been called German, Irish, Scandinavian or even Russian). In German, I still retain my Romance pitch, but I'm usually mistaken for a Romanian or a Frenchman. In Russian, people tend to say I sound like a Western European, but that's it (if it has any meaning in the first place). In Serbo-Croatian, my newest foreign language, my accent was at first blatantly Russian, but it slowly became more and more Italian over time. At any rate, my accent has never caused problems so far, to the point that I can converse with native speakers for hours.

I'm glad pronunciation, stress and rhythm are not taught. I love to hear people speaking with different accents.

Very nice short video! I learned several things in under three minutes.

Stress is an underrated part of language learning. In my native language, even though not tonal, a wrong stress could change the meaning of the word. Same goes with cadence, one could easily tell if the person is not a native speaker.

I know using the aspirated plosive "P" as an example was just that - an example - but a *much* bigger accent problem for English to French would be VOWELS and, like the video said, prosody.

I'd say the most distinct thing about languages is how to prononce "R/р"-sound. Probably every language has its own "flavor" about it.

I’m peruvian, I speak Spanish and I learned English while living in Peru. I have lived 2 years in Italy and I moved to France 22 years ago and now my English have a Spanish/French accent, my Italian has a French accent too and my French has a little accent… the Frenchs always ask me if I’m Italian! 😂 What a MESS !

Really wish I could remove my accent completely. Most of my friends from England really despise the way I speak as it's unintelligible, but Americans seem to have no issue with it. Like, it's not that my English proficiency is terrible... it's just that I'd love to speak it as well as native speakers out of respect for their native language.

I am a native English speaker. I was fluent in French and Spanish, though losing now through lack of use. When in France, native French speakers assumed that I was also, because I naturally pick up the accents of native speakers. Although I have a distinct Madrilenian accent when speaking Spanish, I have, outside Spain been asked if I was Argentinian. However, Spaniards outside Madrid usually assumed that I was from the capital. Even in languages where I can only make myself understood, Dutch, German, Italian, and Welsh, I take on the accent. Sometimes this is not helpful though. People assume that I know more of their language than I do. The only other time that I have problems is when the same occurs with English accents. I find myself using the same accent as the person that I'm talking to in lots of cases. Even though that person rarely notices, I have been criticised for mimicking by those who have overheard me. I am not, I just pick up the subtle clues naturally, and without thinking adjust my speech pattern.

I speak Spanish (mother tongue), English and French but I've been living in France for the past 9 years. I learned English before learning French but now I have a French accent when I speak English, it's so weird, haha, people must think I do it on purpose or something but it just comes out like that naturally. My theory is because the foreign language I speak the most is French, so my brain goes on French mode more easily. I'm also learning Italian and instead of going to the Spanish intonation which is more similar to Italian I go with the French one. I gues it has become such a big part of my life that it's taking over, I kind of like and hate it at the same time.

ngl the first thought that came to my mind reading the title was muscle memory lol

I have an accent in my native language.

As a native English speaker who has studied many other languages and speaks Spanish the best of all the languages I've learned, properly rolling my R has been the absolute most difficult thing I've ever tried to accomplish. Despite being able to roll my Rs briefly, I cannot sustain a smooth R roll and when saying words like "Carro" it sounds more like "cardo" even though I do technically roll my R, I just can't lose the stiff English tongue. Thank goodness for Chinese

Amazing Video. At first I thought: „why bother watching it. We all know why some have an accent and some don't" but 100% worth watching.

I am bilingual in English and mathematics. My brother, who is 6 years older, is multilingual in English, C++, Java, Python, scripting languages.

Berlusconi is a bad example when it comes to listening through walls these days.

😂 I learnt more in those 3 minutes than I did in 15 years of language class in school 🙈💡

This was a great video!

As a native English speaker living in Argentina, I often would confuse Brazilian Portuguese conversations for American English ones if a conversation was faint enough that I couldn’t make out the words. Something about the pacing and stress in sentences felt similar, also the vowels are much more similar than to the very clear and short Spanish vowels.

How P is different in those two examples (English/French)? I'm a native (Brazilian) Portuguese speaker and fluent in English and, to me, they sound the same. My method for trying them was typing them on Google Translator, selecting the language and clicking on Play 😀 Sorry if that's not OK... And one curious thing we are taught when learning Portuguese: there is only one stress syllable on every word and there are diacritics to boot. I never ever thought that in English there could be a primary stress and a secondary stress. Really interesting short video.

I think most accent sound comes from the position of the tongue. If anyone wants to drastically reduce their accent, they need to study the *vowel position of tongue* of a language. It's way more significant factor influencing accents in non-native language. For example, for American English, the tongue has to be as flat to the bottom of the mouth as possible, whereas for British English, the back of the tongue needs to arch up