My fellow Americans, in your experience, which native language speakers have that hardest time adapting to an American English accent over time?
My fellow Americans, in your experience, which native language speakers have that hardest time adapting to an American English accent over time?
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What? I wouldn’t expect others to change to having an American accent. There isn’t even one distinct American accent.
Maybe Chinese/ Mandarin
Just really different sounds and intonations
Them there city folks be talking all confusin. I take it them yankees probably have a hard time understanding the American language we talk down in the real America of the U S of A. Yes sir. /s
could I help you clarify? do you mean “which native language speakers have the hardest time developing an ‘American’ accent” while speaking English? just want to make sure your point is clear
What do you mean by adapting to? Understanding it or being able to speak in it themselves? Because the answer is very different depending on which one.
I think it has more to do with people’s age when they immigrate that the native language. The older someone is when they learn English the stronger the accent.
The same holds true for English speakers learning another language.
We don’t really expect non-native English speakers to adopt an American accent. Many develop an accent picked up from the native speakers they interact with, if they live in the US that would be whatever region they live in, or whomever their English instructor was, but deliberately speaking with an American accent for no reason would be considered odd and a bit fake, tbh. Like when Brits in UK tv do American accents, it sounds weird to us.
My wonderful friend from Japan never really got certain consonant sounds after many years but my gosh she came a long way.
Folks who gain fluency in a new language as adults will always amaze me.
This is going to be a hard thing for most people to gauge unless they’re an ESL teacher or something. Most people do not necessarily have that broad of experience talking to a particularly diverse group of immigrants or have that much insight into how long they’ve been learning and adjusting.
Mine because I am loud they love me in the army for that.
Do you mean difficult to understand? I think South and east Asian maybe? I feel stupid for even saying it because I really suck at languages – but I feel like they so often are really good at understanding it but it’s gotta be really tricky to speak it.
Probably East/Southeast Asian languages — and vice versa. I can never get Korean words quite right, for instance, and I’ve been learning for a while.
And of course, tons of Americans have accents, so even if someone never loses theirs, as long as it’s understandable to the average person they’re fine.
Honestly depends on how long and hard they have been studying, how long they have been here for genuine exposure/practice, and how much their home country emphasizes use of it.
Many Europeans such as from Germany, Netherlands, and Nordic countries speak great American sounding English because most of them speak it well in their home country from education, and cultural and entertainment exchange is high. Not all of them don’t have an accent or anything, but I’ve often been surprised at how much more natural they sound.
Some languages and cultures are very “isolated” from natural English, study isn’t emphasized, and entertainment isn’t as prevalent since these places often have their own entertainment and strong cultural ties to their language. You see this mostly in East/South East Asians and Middle Eastern people.
Africa and India have a large English presence too but often have very strong accents too because their own language is so different.
IME Chinese. My amateur guess is the demands of a tonal language are hard to leave behind. Some Chinese people sound like they are yelling angrily, when they are just talking normally. It can be very tiring listening to it.
That said, they’re doing better than me. I couldn’t learn Spanish, which is probably the easiest from English. I respect anyone who learns English — it’s an absurdly nonsensical crazy quilt of a language.
Apparently our “r” sounds are rare to find in other languages especially Asian tonal languages. So that may cause a difficulty. I am a native Louisianan & I had to have a speech therapy in kindergarten-3rd grade for certain sounds including the “r” sounds. I did the Elmer Fudd “w” as in “wabbit.”
I actually think it is more difficult to adapt to an American accent if you speak fluent English in the dialect of your home country.
I have noticed this specifically in some people I know from India, who speak and understand English, but seem to maintain a heavy accent — as that is the way they have always spoken English.
Hard to say. You have Germans like Henry Kissinger who never lost his accent after 80+ years and Germans like Dirk Nowitzki who lost his accent after about 10 years. It really depends on the individual.
It just depends on how old they were when they learned the language.
If we’re talking about adult learners who are going to be guaranteed to have an accent, the genetic distance from English will likely be the determining factor. So Germanic language speakers will probably have the easiest time, then Romance language speakers given the heavy overlap in vocabulary, then other Indo-European language speakers, and then beyond that I suspect all will struggle equally. Or maybe some linguist has done studies about the degree of phonemic overlap various non Indo European languages have with English but I am not aware of it and my laymans opinion is that the differences are substantial enough that it probably doesn’t make a difference.
I feel like this is a person by person basis. I know people who are from Croatia, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, India, Vietnam and China. All these people that I know from all these different countries English is their second language. Some of them speak English very very well.
The person I know who is from Croatia has a slight accent to their English but it sounds like they’re from New York. I know someone who’s from Mexico and their accent is ridiculously thick even though they’ve been in the United States for 30 some odd years. The people from Greece in Italy have a bit of an accent but are clearly understandable to speak with. The person from Bulgaria has a slight stereotypical Slavic accent in their English and while most of the time it is easy to understand what they are saying there are certain words that are undiscernible. I’ve known some people from India who speak English very clearly and some who have an extremely thick accent. Known people from Vietnam whose English always has an accent but it varies how thick it is.
All of this to say that everyone is different. For some it might help how early they started to learn their English but then for others it doesn’t matter. I went to high school with somebody who was an exchange student from Switzerland and she spoke three languages and sounded like your average American generic accent.
Anyone who has isolated in their own cultural or ethnic community will be unlikely to develop strong English language skills.
Speakers of tonal languages, as a rule. And speakers of languages that lack phonemes English has.
No one has to or would change to an American accent. Speak clearly and any accent is fine.
Arnold Schwarzenegger moved to the US in 1968 so I’m going to say Austrians
Imo I’d say Deez