What causes foreign accents?

16 June 2005

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Foreign accents have been around for a long time. The Old Testament tells us how the Gileadites destroyed the infiltrating army of their enemy: They set up roadblocks and made each man who approached them say the Gileadite word "Shibboleth". The Ephraimites couldn't pronounce the "s-h" sound. And when they said "sibboleth" -- the Gileadites killed them on the spot.

The consequences aren't often that dramatic, but we're all experts at detecting things about people from the way they talk. Even on the phone we know a person's sex, approximate age -- even whether he or she is smiling. And like the Gileadites, we usually know right away whether the person is a native speaker of our language. For example, listen to these two voices. Each speaker is reading the phrase:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:

[French accent]

[Sicilian accent]

You should be able to tell right away that one of these people is female and young, and the other is male and somewhat older. You can also tell, just from those few words, that neither is a native English speaker. The first is a native of France; the second is from Sicily. Let's call them "Dominique" and "Marcello".

What is it about their speech that lets us immediately recognize them as non-native English speakers? And what makes their accents different from each other? Well, linguists talk about something they call "language transfer". When you first learn a new language, you'd like to sound like a native, but you unavoidably carry over, or transfer, some of the characteristics of your own language to it. Dominique, for example, wants to say these, but French doesn't have the "t-h" sound of English, so she uses something from her inventory of French sounds that's close to the "t-h." The result sounds something like "zeese". Marcello doesn't have the "t-h" sound either; so he substitutes Sicilian "t" or "d" for it (he says "deese tings" for "these things"). You may have noticed that he also tacks vowels onto the ends of English words (as in "aska her to bringa deze tings"). This happens because most words in Sicilian end in vowels, and it doesn't feel right to him to end words in consonants. He's transferring not just sounds but his Sicilian language habits to English.

These are exactly the things that actors pay attention to when they want to sound like foreign speakers of English. Here's Mel Blanc portraying the amorous French skunk, Pepe Le Pew. Notice how he modifies his "t-h" sounds, and how he stresses English words on their last syllable, as though they were French.

[Pepe Le Pew clip]

So when Dominique and Marcello speak English -- and when we try to speak foreign languages -- are we doomed to sound like cartoon characters forever? Of course not. We can't help starting out that way. But what Mel Blanc does to his English to give it a French flavor, we can do to our French, Russian, or Arabic to give it a French, Russian, or Arabic flavor.

Can that make us sound like native speakers? Well, yes and no. Professional linguists say that people who start learning a new language after puberty can never completely get rid of traces of their original tongue. Sensitive instruments in a linguistics lab can spot them. But we don't live in a lab. And most of us know someone who speaks a second language so well they don't sound foreign at all. With hard work and uninhibited imitation of sounds -- maybe inspired by Pepe Le Pew -- we can gradually get an accent that sounds very close to that of a native. And that's a pretty good goal to shoot for.

That linguistic thought comes from Dr. Steven Weinberger, director of the linguistics program, and the Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about language, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.