Why do foreigners always "sound" like their own people

You can close your eyes and identify Mexican, Asian, African, French, German- just from the accent. If I was a foreign-born American, I'd do my damndest to sound like the guy reading the 6 o'clock news.

OP, after a certain age, most people just can't learn to speak another language without their native accents. Kids can, no problem, but at some point in our teens we lose that ability.
Americans can't even manage to "sound" British and vice versa.
OP - this has to be one of the most stupid questions I have ever seen on DL. Congratulations!
oP dRunK
[quote]If I was a foreign-born American, I'd do my damndest to sound like the guy reading the 6 o'clock news. Multiculturalism has changed this -- I remember back in the 80s, even Southerners were going to classes to get rid of their accents.
No r5, it's only the lowlifes who resist change.
There are some South Americans who have lived in the US for DECADES and are still barely understandable. The inverse is the Dutch, a few years and almost no accent.
OP judging from your post I guess I should assume your people are morons
You are profoundly stupid, OP. Undoubtedly, you have never made the slightest attempt to learn another language.
Who cares about accents? I just wish I could get some fast food without the order getting all screwed up! Why do humans still do the order taking, anyway? I should be able to order using a cellphone app by now. I already saw an article where they had a machine that made and packaged fresh burgers, and it was smart enough to accept requests to hold the onions, etc.
Faux Naive Troll strikes again. This time he wants us to berate him for being an idiot.
R10, I remember reading an article 2 or 3 years ago about how waitstaff may become obsolete. In the article, a restaurant was featured (whose name I can't recall) that had these touch-screen tablet things on the table. The customers basically looked at the iMenu and pushed certain buttons to make their selections and a person would come out with their food when it was ready.
Why do you speak like a white trash hillbilly, OP?
[quote]The inverse is the Dutch, a few years and almost no accent. So very true.
Yolanda%20
Certain nationalities find it especially difficult to do a decent American accent, especially:- The Chinese & The Spanish It's especially strange when they speak 100% fluently...with a terrible, unintelligible accent.
R7 - Since Dutch is a Germanic language and a lot of English words have their roots in Germanic languages, I can understand why it's easier for them to lose their accent sooner than other nationalities. R12 - Wasn't there a chain of "gourmet hamburger" restaurants in the 1980's that had telephones at each of the tables/booths and you could pick up the phone and put in your order and someone would deliver the food to you? I vaguely remember that as a child. I'm pretty sure that got old quickly. I don't know if waitstaff will go out of style anytime soon because there are too many people who like to be served or treat waitstaff like shit as some sort of power trip.
[quote]Dutch is a Germanic language and a lot of English words have their roots in Germanic languages Really, which words? Most English words derive from Latin, so that invalidates your theory, doesn't it? Let's move on.
Accents can be so sexy, fuck you bitches
OP = idiot du jour
You're wrong, R17. English is derived from Germanic language. Spanish, French, Italian are called Romance languages 'cause they're derived from Latin. Some of their words have slipped into English usage, but English did not descend from Latin.
I have a friend who is Swedish. He's lived here for ten or eleven years and speaks flawless American English with no accent. (hes 33) He said it's because they watched so much American TV, and it was a ll subtitled, not dubbed - so they learned to speak English with an American accent.
This is a new phenomenon...the Swedish always used to speak English with a (sort of) British (sort of) accent.
R17 - Let me clarify (which I should have did in my previous post), I do agree that the majority of English words are derived from Latin, but there is a strong Germanic influence in the English language. To what degree is a matter of debate, but the influence is there. Which is why I said "a lot," and not "most." But nice attempt at being a snarky and dismissive!
R16
You weren't weren't wront R16/R23. English is a West Germanic language. It has no ties to Latin. It's only because certain Italian, Spanish, and French words/phrases have become commonplace that R17 is wrongly convinced that it is also a Romance language.
R17 is wrong, and painfully so. Yes, English has many words from Latin and French, but the core vocabulary - those words which appear time and time again in even the simplest conversations - are clearly Germanic.
There is no excuse not to assimilate, especially as far as dropping their accents. I've always wondered about this, particularly for people who have careers, such as doctors. A relatives in-laws have been in the US since 1951, they are from Austria. I can barely understand the mother-in-law. Meanwhile, another of their relatives, who came here at the same time, he speaks perfect un-accented English. He was a high end tailor in Manhattan. I think part of this situation is about not wanting to make the effort, it's not about not speaking English. All these people I've mentioned all speak and write in English.
Learning Romance languages from English is easier than learning German from English.
[quote]which I should have did in my previous post Well, I think you're doing very well, considering English is clearly not your first language. How are you doing with the accent hassle?
If you ever meet an English person who has lived in America for a very long time and still has a totally English accent, ask them if they like music...they'll tell you no, not very much. and...it's also (VERY) likely that they're not good listeners. They like to talk, but aren't really interested in what others have to say
R28 go fuck yourself and take that smug attitude and shove it up your self-important ass...I was born in this country and have been speaking English since I was able to talk.
The English debt to Germany has been overstated. Most English people, not just the upper class, spoke French at one time and French is deeply embedded in it.
That's not true either, R31. The upper classes spoke Norman French, and some of those features became prestigious, trickling down to the lower-class English speakers. This, for example, is believed to have caused the collapse of the verbal inflection system in English - compare the conjugation of an Old English verb with a Middle English verb. Most people continued to speak English, though, now enhanced with doublets ('cordial' vs. 'hearty'). If most of the English speakers had come to speak French, it would have - with its prestige at the time - wiped English out. This is what happened to Native American dialects with the influence of Spanish and English - it's called 'language shift'. English is a Germanic language. Strong Latinate influence, yes... But indubitable Germanic at its very core.
R25%2C%20Actual%20Linguist
R19 nailed it.
There is no way in hell that I would want to sound like the guy reading the news
Brit living in U.S.
[quote]It's especially strange when they speak 100% fluently...with a terrible, unintelligible accent. So odd when that happens! Yeah, I must say: I went to college with what seemed like mostly international kids. The ones with most reliably slight accents were from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands. The others with little or no accents were from countries that used English as an (un)official language.
Most Americans do not speak like a news announcer. And many of them are actually Canadians with a better accent without that nasal twangy sound. Oh and it's no wonder that Scandinavians and the Dutch adapt best as they are closely related to English.
One of my mom's friends is from Scotland, but doesn't speak with a brogue or in "Broad Scots". She speaks with an upper-crust English accent. She was educated in England and is the illegitimate daughter of a Scottish noble,so maybe that's why.
Why do Polish and Russians immigrants say "go to hospital" instead of "go to the hospital" ?
r37 The Scots nobles never had a brogue since most had been usurped by the English. It is the same in the US -- Few of the wealthy kids in my Boston college had the accents of their native states; they all sounded like each other.
R38, that is common usage in British English and many other parts of the world.
Aussie
[quote] Learning Romance languages from English is easier than learning German from English. No, English is Germanic, as R32 rightly points out. I am a native English speaker who speaks Swedish. It was relatively easy to learn because the entire basic structure was full of cognates, since Swedish is also a Germanic language. Cognates include most verb constructions involving shall, will, could etc., and most basic words such as I, you, they/them, hound, cat, cows, horses, swine, eye, ear, finger, nose, arm, foot, toes, teeth, heart, blood, live, die, scream, shriek, bread, sorrow, gladness, knife, eat, drink, listen, tree, shit, piss etc. etc. Most of these cognates in Swedish or English (of which this is the tiniest sample of the top of my head {"head" is also a cognate}) will all have shared cognates with the other extant Germanic languages of German, Dutch, Frisian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Afrikaans, Yiddish and Faroese.
Most Scandinavians retain their accents, and they all learn English at school from about age 9. I think accents are interesting, and make for a nice change of pace. Accents in no way reflect intent or ability. Some of you have some serious mental problems.
"Perfect unaccented English". There is no such thing. If you think someone doesn't have an accent then they just have an accent similar to yours. An American accent is still an accent. It's not even the most common English accent globally (that's probably Indian). I'll never understand why some Americans seem to believe they do not have an accent. It takes a staggering lack of self-awareness.
Bless you R43.
R32 is confusing what actually happened from what people of the upper class tell you happened. The official legal language of England for centuries was French. But old French you see, had a lot of Germanic influence too. The Franks, after all, were a German tribe, and the Normans included a Scandinavian elite. English is best seen not as a Germanic language but as a corruption of old French, which was a hybrid Latin and Germanic language.
It is easier to understand the Song of Roland in the original if you are an English speaker than if you are a speaker of modern French.
Your unappealing East Tennessee accent is just glaring at us, R44.
r43, for decades radio and television announcers and news people were trained to speak "General American English," the most neutral dialect. While people in the South had accents, the newscasters they heard didn't and listeners probably didn't notice.
[quote] English is best seen not as a Germanic language but as a corruption of old French, which was a hybrid Latin and Germanic language. This is wholly untrue. English is a Germanic tongue. Are you being bull-headed? P.S. Every single word I wrote above is of Germanic origin, with the exception of the word Germanic itself, as it is the linguistic term we are arguing about. You would not be able to do the same with French/Latinate-rooted words, because words such as "you", "I", "this", "is", "a" are all of Germanic origin - the ROOTS of English are German.
No, R32 is 100% correct. We all know that Old French entertained a strong Germanic influence; however, that did not quash the Latin core. (There is no way that any serious scholar would say that French was a 'hybrid' Germanic/Latin language. It is a language derived from Latin with a Germanic superstrate. Do you think Spanish is a 'hybrid' Arabic/Latin language? Because Spanish witnessed a similarly notable incursion, without changes to its core - and no one says that about Spanish.) English, in the same vein, is most certainly a Germanic language, and viewing it as a corruption of Old French is totally off-base. If English were simply a 'corruption' of Old French, the numbers, pronouns, and other basic vocabulary items would be closer to French than Frisian, Dutch, and German. This is not at all the case.
Sorry, my iPhone corrected that: it should read: "the ROOTS of English are Germanic."
R49
Why would I want to sound like Brian Williams?
I was responding to R45, by the way. it looks like a lot of people are surprised by R31/R45's claim...
R50
This is a sample of 'Le Chanson de Roland', in the original Old French: "Carles li reis, nostre emper[er]e magnes Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne: Tresqu'en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne. N'i ad castel ki devant lui remaigne; \t Mur ne citet n'i est remes a fraindre, Fors Sarraguce, ki est en une muntaigne. Li reis Marsilie la tient, ki Deu nen aimet; Mahumet sert e Apollin recleimet: Nes poet guarder que mals ne l'i ateignet." A Modern French speaker will certainly understand more of this than a modern English speaker.
R50
R48, accents are entirely relative. There is really no such thing as a neutral accent. A RP British accent will sound heavily accented to an American, etc. The neutral accent is like the "skin-colour" crayon.
R44
You mean "flesh" colored.
Ugh, we KNOW that accents are relative. While this is still a pretty dumb thread (at least the OP), that's not quite what it's about.
What's Frisian? It's Frisian outside.
Me no think good. What? What you? You not fum my house, no. Huh?
OP
|R48, that generic American accent that news readers used to use in the US is an accent. It is not neutral on non-accented. It's an American accent. But a specific one, with a specific social context that is considered neutral within the US. People outside the US would still consider it strongly accented. Everybody has an accent. It's not possible not to have one.
"Why do you speak like a white trash hillbilly, OP" I don't. I have the American midwestern accent, which is the closest thing to the way the dictionary says to pronounce things. I don't say 'caint' or 'cahnt' or' 'carnt'- I say can't, like ant.
As if. Midwesterners say cyaaant in a nasal tone.