A language learners’ forum

Montmorency wrote:Just to make it clear: I was not saying that you should try to imitate RP (or anything else), but that if you wanted to imitate an English accent, then the two I mentioned were the only realistic choices, and I stand by that. (We can go into why, if you like, but I won't do so here.)

I would love to hear why.

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reineke wrote:The overwhelming majority of ESL learners will default to British English or American English. Someone in Greece or Egypt is not likely to pick up Australian or Scottish accent. A handful of people may try, most will fail. It's a simple matter of numbers.

"Australia produced nearly 400 films between 1970 and 1985 - more than had been made in the history of the Australian film industry."

UK may produce as many movies in about three years, US in a single year. There's also a small matter of geography. I can only see someone with a satellite antenna in Southeast Asia successfully developing an Australian accent. Australian immigrants too, obviously.

We produce far more television than film and that's available on the various TV stations' online streaming platforms. All a learner would need is an Australian VPN or a subscription to a DNS solution like UnoTelly. Australian-dialect media is very accessible and very voluminous compared to most non-English languages. (I'm just saying it's totally possible. I wouldn't recommend a learner go out of their way to pick up an Australian accent unless they have a special connection to us or a love of our culture)

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To pick up one specific dialect you don't have to avoid consumption of other dialects...

AlexTG wrote:To pick up one specific dialect you don't have to avoid consumption of other dialects...

The Australian accent would need to overwhelm the other two. It's easier to practice most "non-English languages" as you call them. Btw, I am a great believer that all sorts of things are possible in language learning.

tastyonions wrote:I speak online sometimes with a woman from Morocco who has a very good but not quite native accent when she speaks English. The funny thing is that she has a noticeable Texas twang to her English, despite never having been to the United States: apparently when she started learning the language she spent tons of time practicing with a guy from Texas.

Dirk Nowitski is another example. He has mainly a German accent with some Texas mixed in.

On not wanting to perfect accent: I had a professor in college who immigrated from Cuba in his teens. He deliberately exaggerated his Spanish accent while at work. I know because occasionally he would forget the facade, and say a few sentences with an American accent. I was never quite certain why he wanted to sound more Spanish.

Tomás wrote:I had a professor in college who immigrated from Cuba in his teens. He deliberately exaggerated his Spanish accent while at work. I know because occasionally he would forget the facade, and say a few sentences with an American accent. I was never quite certain why he wanted to sound more Spanish.

What did he teach? If it was Spanish or some linguistic field then the accent would give him more perceived authority. If it wasn't, maybe his English wasn't quite perfect and he was aware of it - if someone with a foreign (in this case Cuban) accent makes a mistake then people will generally ignore it; if someone with an American accent makes the same mistake it may undermine their credibility in some people's eyes (depending of course on what the mistake was).

Alphathon wrote:

Tomás wrote:I had a professor in college who immigrated from Cuba in his teens. He deliberately exaggerated his Spanish accent while at work. I know because occasionally he would forget the facade, and say a few sentences with an American accent. I was never quite certain why he wanted to sound more Spanish.

What did he teach? If it was Spanish or some linguistic field then the accent would give him more perceived authority. If it wasn't, maybe his English wasn't quite perfect and he was aware of it - if someone with a foreign (in this case Cuban) accent makes a mistake then people will generally ignore it; if someone with an American accent makes the same mistake it may undermine their credibility in some people's eyes (depending of course on what the mistake was).

He was a sociology prof. He recently retired as head of the department at Princeton, so a high flyer in his field. I think your insecurity hypothesis is a good one. I never heard him make a grammatical error though. His English was better than most natives. He just had an accent.

Age of onset and nativelikeness in a second language: Listener perception versus linguistic scrutiny

"The incidence of nativelikeness in adult second language acquisition is a controversial issue in SLA research. Although some researchers claim that any learner, regardless of age of acquisition, can attain nativelike levels of second language (L2) proficiency, others hold that attainment of nativelike proficiency is, in principle, impossible. The discussion has traditionally been framed within the paradigm of a critical period for language acquisition and guided by the question of whether SLA is constrained by the maturation of the brain. The work presented in this article can be positioned among those studies that have focused exclusively on the apparent counterexamples to the critical period. We report on a large-scale study of Spanish/Swedish bilinguals (n = 195) with differing ages of onset of acquisition (<1–47 years), all of whom identify themselves as potentially nativelike in their L2. Listening sessions with native-speaker judges showed that only a small minority of those bilinguals who had started their L2 acquisition after age 12, but a majority of those with an age of onset below this age, were actually perceived as native speakers of Swedish. However, when a subset (n = 41) of those participants who did pass for native speakers was scrutinized in linguistic detail with a battery of 10 highly complex, cognitively demanding tasks and detailed measurements of linguistic performance, representation, and processing, none of the late learners performed within the native-speaker range; in fact, the results revealed also that only a few of the early learners exhibited actual nativelike competence and behavior on all measures of L2 proficiency that were employed. Our primary interpretation of the results is that nativelike ultimate attainment of a second language is, in principle, never attained by adult learners and, furthermore, is much less common among child learners than has previously been assumed."

Academic paper (PDF): Age of onset and nativelikeness in a second language: Listener perception versus linguistic scrutiny. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... c_scrutiny [accessed Apr 9, 2017].