Superfact 18: Accents are very difficult to lose. People may speak and understand a second language perfectly and still have a strong accent in that language assuming they did not learn the second language in childhood. This is a fact that is well known to the 20.6% of people in the US who are bilingual and to the 43% of people in the world who are bilingual. Yet many monolingual people are unaware of and surprised by this basic and important language fact.
I can’t lose my accent
On one occasion when I took my oldest son to the playground a guy doing the same started talking to me. Hearing my accent, he asked me where I was from (Sweden) and how long I had been here (10 years). Then the guy said, “I am surprised that after all these years you still have an accent”.
This is a sentiment I’ve come across many times here in the US, but not as often in Europe. Monolingual people are surprised to hear bilingual people’s accent. When I tell people about the reality of accents and that it is difficult to lose one without major speech therapy, they act very surprised. It is a basic and important language fact that is surprising to those who don’t know it. That’s why I think this counts as a super fact.
I have difficulty hearing my own accent, which is to be expected according to this article . However, my accent becomes obvious to me when I hear myself speaking on a recording such as when I was interviewed by NBC about the tornado that ravaged our neighborhood five years ago. At first, I was thinking “oh shoot my accent is so obvious and now the whole world knows”, then I was thinking it is no big deal. If you want to hear my accent, click on this link. It is NBC news and my interview is located at : 1 minute and 11 seconds.
Accents are very difficult to lose
What monolingual people typically do not know but practically all bilingual people do know, is that it’s difficult to lose an accent as an adult learning a new language. Children can do it but not adults, not without major speech therapy. This article states that the cut off age is around 12 years old.
According to a test I took, my vocabulary and understanding of English grammar at the time of the incident above was above the average for native English speakers, and it was just as easy for me to understand, speak, read and write English, as Swedish. Yet my accent was obvious.
It should not really come as a surprise to monolingual people, but it does. After all, if you think about it, famous foreign actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Werner Herzog, Marion Cotillard, Stellan Skarsgård. etc., speak with an accent even after living in the US and/or working for Hollywood, several decades, and they are not faking it. I have several friends and relatives who speak with a strong foreign accent after living in the United States for 30, 40, 50, and 60 years. If they came as adults, they still have their accent.
As this article states, “accents are extremely difficult to lose because our infant brains codify a lifetime’s worth of sounds before we’ve spoken our first word”. As this article explains as we age our brains become more specialized in our native language sounds, making it harder to accurately perceive and produce new sounds from another language, a phenomenon often referred to as the “critical period hypothesis” in language acquisition; essentially, the window for easily acquiring perfect pronunciation closes during childhood.
A few second language facts
The most popular second language in the world with respect to the number of non-native speakers (data taken from this site).
- (1) English – 1,140 million non-native speakers
- (2) Hindi – 264 million non-native speakers
- (3) Chinese (Mandarin) – 199 million non-native speakers
- (4) Urdu – 162 million non-native speakers
- (5) French – 132 million non-native speakers
- (6) Arabic – 109 million non-native speakers
- (7) Russian – 107 million non-native speakers
- (8) Spanish – 74 million non-native speakers
- (9) Bengali – 43 million non-native speakers
- (10) Portuguese – 28 million non-native speakers
The most popular second language in the world with respect to number of countries.
- (1) English – 55 countries
- (2) French – 14 countries
- (3) Russian – 13 countries
- (4) Spanish – 8 countries
- (5) Creole – 8 countries
- 6) Arabic – 6 countries
- (7) Kurdish – 4 countries
- (8) Portuguese – 4 countries
- (9) Italian – 3 countries
- (10) Quechua – 3 countries
To see the other Super Facts click here
Newstrade
South Africa has 12 official languages (SA sign languages was just included last year).
Everyone here speaks with an accent. You can hear it. I can hear it. Yet I’ve been asked countess times where am I from (lives here over 20 years) because of my accent.
I love my accent. It is part of my cultural heritage.
Great article.
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Thank you so much Patricia for your very kind comment. 12 official languages is a lot. Sweden has 5 official languages. However, a linguist told me that I am not really speaking Swedish but Norrlandish (northern Swedish), which is different enough from Swedish to be its own language, well according to him. So that would be another language.
You have a very good way of looking at things. Accents are difficult to get rid of but should we really work that hard to get rid of it? I am not ready for years of speech therapy. I am learning French and my accent in French is very Swedish according to my teacher. I sound completely different from the other American students. I think that is funny. I am stuck with the sounds I learned in my childhood.
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Hi Thomas — I for one, like your accent. Think of it just as part of the brand — like Schwarzenegger. And at present, it gives you much more credibility than an American accent! Best, Ben
Bennett Voylesbennettvoyles.de Tel. +49 151 62967276 Winterfeldtstr. 39 10781 Berlin, Germany
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Thank you so much for your kind words Ben. Also Claudia says Hello.
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interesting, my husband grew up in Poland, but learned English in Austria and Sweden and sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, not a typical Polish accent. Maggie
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Yes that is interesting. Could it be that because he learned English in Austria and Sweden and that somehow that created his accent? I don’t know. As for me, I grew up in Sweden, and my French teacher tells me I have strong Swedish accent in French.
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I don’t know, it is definitely not typical Polish.
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It is interesting and a bit puzzling
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It’s almost impossible to lose accents, but the degree of accent can vary depending on the person’s native language. For instance, I notice that Spanish and Italian people usually keep a strong accent in English no matter how many years or decades they are frequently speaking it. It’s related to their native pronunciation of words, including tongue twists and throat movements—something learned and rooted since early childhood. Anyway, accents are not a problem; they denote bilingual (at least) skills, which is not for everyone. I see it as a plus! Thank you for sharing, Thomas! Light and blessings to you*
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That is interesting information. I think that strong accents when speaking English is common in many other languages as well. I’ve also heard that “tongue twists and throat movements—something learned and rooted since early childhood” is important to pronunciation of words, as well as the growing brain. That’s why you usually keep the accent unless you do some serious speech therapy. I know a Swedish actor (Dolph Lundgren) who hired speech therapists for that purpose. Someone who watched an interview with him told me that he hired a therapist who teaches deaf people how to speak, but I have not been able to verify that via google. He could barely speak Swedish afterwards. Light and blessings to you as well.
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HI Thomas, most people I work with are not English first language speakers. Many have heavy accents, and I am used to the plethora of different accents and don’t struggle to understand most people. However, people from French speaking or Portuguese speaking Africa are another story. Their accents are different and strong and it can be hard to understand what they are saying sometimes. Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that I can always tell a non-English first language writer even when their English is perfect. It is they way they use the language. When you are taught a language at school, you are taught a ‘higher’ version of that language than people use in ordinary daily speech. This makes the flow of their writing in books, articles and other communications a bit more stilted for want of another word. It’s a bit unnatural to an English native speaker. Does that make sense to you?
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That is quite interesting information. I’ve read somewhere that AI can tell from even perfectly fine English writing that the person is not a native English speaker. I did not know people could figure that out too when listening. Maybe it is because you are taught a ‘higher’ version of English like you say and maybe something else too. During the first few years in the US I wrote a lot of research papers and my advisor told me that I tended to write English sentences so that the sentence structure sounded German. It wasn’t German, it was Swedish, but he thought it was like German. It wasn’t entirely wrong, but it just did not sound right and the verbs were often in an awkward place. He went through my papers and fixed several sentences. Perhaps the grammar or sentence construction in the native language might linger? I am just speculating.
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Hi Thomas, I think your advisor may have been correct. I upset one of my colleagues a great deal when I said that I could tell that he was English second language. He prided himself on perfect English. It was, but no-one actually speaks for writes like that – smile! I wasn’t meaning it negatively, btw. It can just be a bit clunky in dialogue in books, but I admire anyone who learns to speak another language well. This is something I have not done. Although I can understand Afrikaans reasonably well, I hesitate to speak it.
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No I know he was right. Hopefully it has gotten a little bit better though. Afrikaans is pretty similar to Dutch isn’t it? That would be a difficult language to learn.
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Hi Thomas, Afrikaans is similar to Dutch and I could read the Dutch when I was in Netherlands this year. Not so hard, but I had a bad attitude because the teacher used to belittle me because of my English accent.
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“….the teacher used to belittle me because of my English accent.” That’s an extremely bad teacher. It’s bad when people do that, but a teacher, that’s awful.
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There was a lot of bad feelings from Afrikaners towards English people because of what happened during the Second Anglo Boer War. You read my book so you know what happened 🙏🩵
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Actually, I did not read that one yet but I will read it. It seems like a very good book.
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I thought you had read it, my apologies. It is about the Boer war and gives a lot of insight into why there was so much resentment by the Afrikaners towards the English speaking of SA. The British behaved horrendously and have so much to answer for. It is a war book though and also has a paranormal element so it may not be your cup of tea. If you prefer a book that’s just about the war, Deneys Reitz wrote memoires about this war, and they are very good. His books are available from Amazon.
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Actually, I think paranormal stuff adds spice to a story. It sounds very interesting and I am looking forward to reading it. Thank you so much Robbie.
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My pleasure, Thomas. I hope you enjoy it and also gain a lot of understanding about South African history.
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Interesting that your ingrained, born with accent stays with you in some form forever. I love hearing different accents, and really am impressed with people who know more than one language. I took French for a couple of years in school, and we hear Spanish here all the time, but I’ll always sound like a Texan. haha 🙂
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Yes I think different accents / dialects within the same language is pretty difficult to shake as well. The type of Swedish is speak is called Norrlandish and I always sound Norrlandish. I think it is difficult to speak like a Stockholm person. But maybe it is a little easier if it is the same language or almost the same language. When I visited Norway in September I tried speaking Swedish to the Norwegian speech recognition answering machine and it did not understand me. Then I tried imitating Norwegian and it worked. I must have sounded like a Norwegian. A Norwegian human wouldn’t be fooled though, but he would easily understand Swedish. Maybe you could try to sound like you are from New Joysee (New Jersey) a little bit, at least to a machine.
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I’d say I don’t mind accents, but there are those I just can’t understand the words through them! There is one Formula 1 announcer I really struggle to figure out what the heck s/he is saying! Churchill’s famous words come to mind–““England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”–or George Bernard Shaw said it first albeit slightly differently.
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You are right, some accents are really difficult to understand. We have a girl from Brazil in our French class and I cannot understand her French, but the teacher usually does (but he struggles). I think it is often harder when you have to go through two accents, your own and someone elses, or maybe that’s just me. I seem to have a harder time understanding a Chinese accent (speaking English) than most Americans do. On the other hand when someone Swedish or Norwegian speak English with a strong accent I have an easier time understanding it than a native English speaker. Churchill said a lot of clever and funny things.
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Interesting information, Thomas. I’ve always heard it depended sometimes on the age you left your native country, also I’m sure upbringing plays a part too.
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Yes you are right. My wife left France when she was 11 years old and she does not have an accent in English, and she is fluent in French. I on the other hand speak with an accent. Kids with parents who teach their children English, or another second language, at a very early age, are often able to speak without an accent. I’ve seen that.
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growing up moving around a lot, I was always told I had an accent, no matter where I was. so in a way, what is an accent? I adore accents am am especially partial to my husband’s.
whether we hear someone’s accent depends on quite a lot of things, too. people with accents are often perfectionists who are far too hard on themselves. for me, communication is everything and the only thing that matters. language is quite a inexact tool under the best of circumstances. seriously, people who have a problem with accents are somewhere within the spectrum of: bigots, unimaginative, only know english, or idiots
do dogs have accents or are they just little vs big body voices? and why do they understand what we say but we don’t understand what they say?
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I can understand that. My father-in-law speaks seven languages, and he claims he has an accent in every language. I am glad you like accents. It is difficult when you speak to people who are bothered by them. I grew up in a place where everyone spoke Norrlandish, a Swedish northern dialect some say is its own language. It was very countryside and there were no foreigners there, and Swedes from Stockholm or southern Sweden rarely came up there. Well, there were some Finnish speaking people, but in general accents were something strange to me. Then I grew up, met people who were not like myself, and I went to the University and to the US, and now accents are all around me and like them. But I easily get embarrassed when I think there are people listening to me speaking English who do not like accents.
I think dogs communicate very well through body language. Our Rollo just came over and scratched my wife’s knee, and then he turned around facing the bedroom. He was showing her that he wanted to go to the bedroom and wanted her to follow. The bed in the bedroom is his safety spot when a storm is brewing. Just 10 minutes later it started thundering.
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Whether people like which accent is sadly very political and classist. Here people are enamored of anything British so it was amusing and eye opening that in Iran that accent is considered ugly. So you probably now have now have a Swedish Tex accent hehe
Verbal language is a crude tool. Maybe dogs are smarter than us to not even bother with it?
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Amid all this sorry I neglected to say you did a great job with this post!
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It does not surprise me that a British accent sounds ugly in some languages like Farsi. Depending on our language we feel different things when we hear different sounds and we even hear different things according to one of the articles I referenced above. I think the problem is when we extrapolate our local perspective onto the rest of the world. An American who loves a British accent is fine, but he should not expect others to feel or even hear the same thing.
Local perspectives can really mess with us, even with regards to facts. Ask a Texan what the second secondary language after English is and he’ll tell you that it is self-evidently Spanish because in Texas bilingual pretty much means someone who speaks Spanish. However, Spanish is #8 in the world as a secondary language. The Texan is not going to believe you if you tell him that. In addition he may not believe you if you say that Texas is smaller than Alaska.
I think verbal communication has been very beneficial as well as harmful to us humans. Maybe one reason we love dogs so much is that they don’t express themselves verbally. I can imagine how Rollo would insult me if he could, or maybe he would just tell me how much he loved me, or maybe both.
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Sometimes I wish my dog could talk. But then I catch myself. Surely she’d make me feel even guiltier for not feeding her and playing with her 24/7 😹
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Thank you so much for your kind words da-AL
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Yes things would certainly be different if the could talk. Sometimes it almost feels like they can talk. Today we removed the stool that we put by our oldest son’s bed. Rollo used that stool to jump up on the bed. He likes to be on that bed. However, our son and his wife came to visit us today for Thanksgiving and we did not want Rollo to use his bed. Well, Rollo was not happy with this and he came to me and scratch my leg and then he walked over to where the stool used to be. He was telling me to put the stool back. I explained to him in English that we couldn’t do that. I am not sure how much he understood but he accepted it. He makes himself understood.
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What a great story! Great for a post too! I often feel like my dog thinks I’m too easily impressed by her smarts and understanding of human language as well as ability to mind read and hypnotize us 🐶😝
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Ha ha Yes they are probably hypnotizing us. Dogs are amazing animals. Thank you so much for your kind words da-AL.
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Great post Thomas. Me and a friend were discussing this not too long ago. It is said that if a child emigrates, usually up to and around twelve years old, they can lose the accent. My bestie was born in Australia and moved to Canada at aged seven. Her siblings were in their mid and late teens. She has no accent, but they still do! 🙂
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Yes 12 years old, that’s what the article stated too. It is interesting that the same thing happens with accents that are closer such as Australia and Canada.
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So true! 🙂
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My wife would probably deny it, but when I met her she had a mild Long Island accent (“noin” for “nine”, “draw” for “drawer”, etc.). 30-odd years later, after living in upstate New York and then in Southern California, she doesn’t have that accent anymore. But I wonder if I still sound like an upstate New Yorker … 🤔
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Maybe you do. It is difficult to hear your own accent. My suspicion though is that it is a little easier to lose an accent within the same language, but I don’t know.
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Very enlightening post, Thomas. I had no idea that accents remain, if only slightly. I tried to listen to your accent, but the link would not load on my computer. Bummer. I am amazed by your statistics. Living in the U.S. all my life, I wrongly assumed Spanish would be the most popular second language.
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Thank you so much Gwen. That is funny, that the link wouldn’t load. I had to check that I posted the right link, but it loaded on my computer. Anyway, when I was young and lived in Sweden I thought German was the most popular second language after English but it is not even on the list. I guess it is easy to extrapolate from your local environment. In Sweden German was the most popular second language to learn after English. I’ve forgotten almost all of my German. Now I focus on French.
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