Darkobra wrote:ex-Lurker wrote:Since we're talking about accents, I came from Taiwan, am fluent in Mandarin, but learned English in Canada. I have no Chinese accent, I've theorized that this is because I learned from people without accents and learned the language at a young age, is this a valid thing? Any other multilingual people who don't have an "expected" accent?
I have a friend from Somalia who sounds American. I have another friend from the Czech Republic who sounds Scottish. Which is a very stark contrast to another friend who strongly sounds Czech.
You're right on, ex-Lurker. Young children can typically pronounce any phoneme (the basic sounds used in a language) used in human languages, but we lose that ability as we grow order, and find it harder to use phonemes from outside the languages we use on a regular basis. That's why some people who learn a English as an adult find it difficult to pronounce R or L sounds, depending on what their native languages are. It is only expected they'd pass this way of speaking on to anyone that they teach. But if you learn a language at a young age from native speakers, it's much easier to adapt to a different phonology, so you'll adopt whatever dialect they use. A friend of mine was born in Taiwan, but his family moved to Quebec before he learned to speak, then moved to New Brunswick a few years later. So he speaks English with a slight Quebec accent instead.
I've never been to Scotland (or even left Canada), but managed to adopt a Scottish accent from my father. Though according to his mother, he'd adopted an American accent by that point (Americans are likely to disagree on that point). Since my accent is fairly weak, it can be hard to place - I've being told it's anywhere in the British Isles (the usual misconceptions), Russian, or Southern US.
it after all."
