Accents are very difficult to lose

Superfact 18: Accents are very difficult to lose. People may speak and understand a second language perfectly and still have a strong accent in that language assuming they did not learn the second language in childhood. This is a fact that is well known to the 20.6% of people in the US who are bilingual and to the 43% of people in the world who are bilingual. Yet many monolingual people are unaware of and surprised by this basic and important language fact.

I can’t lose my accent

On one occasion when I took my oldest son to the playground a guy doing the same started talking to me. Hearing my accent, he asked me where I was from (Sweden) and how long I had been here (10 years). Then the guy said, “I am surprised that after all these years you still have an accent”.

This is a sentiment I’ve come across many times here in the US, but not as often in Europe. Monolingual people are surprised to hear bilingual people’s accent. When I tell people about the reality of accents and that it is difficult to lose one without major speech therapy, they act very surprised. It is a basic and important language fact that is surprising to those who don’t know it. That’s why I think this counts as a super fact.

Black dog with a Swedish flag | Accents are very difficult to lose
Photo by Efrem Efre on Pexels.com

I have difficulty hearing my own accent, which is to be expected according to this article . However, my accent becomes obvious to me when I hear myself speaking on a recording such as when I was interviewed by NBC about the tornado that ravaged our neighborhood five years ago. At first, I was thinking “oh shoot my accent is so obvious and now the whole world knows”, then I was thinking it is no big deal. If you want to hear my accent, click on this link. It is NBC news and my interview is located at : 1 minute and 11 seconds.

Accents are very difficult to lose

What monolingual people typically do not know but practically all bilingual people do know, is that it’s difficult to lose an accent as an adult learning a new language. Children can do it but not adults, not without major speech therapy. This article states that the cut off age is around 12 years old.

According to a test I took, my vocabulary and understanding of English grammar at the time of the incident above was above the average for native English speakers, and it was just as easy for me to understand, speak, read and write English, as Swedish. Yet my accent was obvious.

It should not really come as a surprise to monolingual people, but it does. After all, if you think about it, famous foreign actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Werner Herzog, Marion Cotillard, Stellan Skarsgård. etc., speak with an accent even after living in the US and/or working for Hollywood, several decades, and they are not faking it. I have several friends and relatives who speak with a strong foreign accent after living in the United States for 30, 40, 50, and 60 years. If they came as adults, they still have their accent.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is holding a gian machine gun pointed into the camera. There is fire and smoke in the background.
Arnold Schwarzenegger a bilingual man Stock Photo ID: 2501506607 by Ralf Liebhold

As this article states, “accents are extremely difficult to lose because our infant brains codify a lifetime’s worth of sounds before we’ve spoken our first word”. As this article explains as we age our brains become more specialized in our native language sounds, making it harder to accurately perceive and produce new sounds from another language, a phenomenon often referred to as the “critical period hypothesis” in language acquisition; essentially, the window for easily acquiring perfect pronunciation closes during childhood.

On the left, a business guy speaking a whole bunch of languages indicated by flags coming out of his mouth. On the right another businessman surrounded by question marks | Accents are very difficult to lose
Past childhood it is much harder to accurately perceive and produce new sounds from another language Stock Photo ID: 1818291203 by pathdoc

A few second language facts

The most popular second language in the world with respect to the number of non-native speakers (data taken from this site).

  • (1) English – 1,140 million non-native speakers
  • (2) Hindi – 264 million non-native speakers
  • (3) Chinese (Mandarin) – 199 million non-native speakers
  • (4) Urdu – 162 million non-native speakers
  • (5) French – 132 million non-native speakers
  • (6) Arabic – 109 million non-native speakers
  • (7) Russian – 107 million non-native speakers
  • (8) Spanish – 74 million non-native speakers
  • (9) Bengali – 43 million non-native speakers
  • (10) Portuguese – 28 million non-native speakers

The most popular second language in the world with respect to number of countries.

  • (1) English – 55 countries
  • (2) French – 14 countries
  • (3) Russian – 13 countries
  • (4) Spanish – 8 countries
  • (5) Creole – 8 countries
  • 6) Arabic – 6 countries
  • (7) Kurdish – 4 countries
  • (8) Portuguese – 4 countries
  • (9) Italian – 3 countries
  • (10) Quechua – 3 countries

To see the other Super Facts click here

Unknown's avatar

Author: thomasstigwikman

My name is Thomas Wikman. I am a software/robotics engineer with a background in physics. I am currently retired. I took early retirement. I am a dog lover, and especially a Leonberger lover, a home brewer, craft beer enthusiast, I’m learning French, and I am an avid reader. I live in Dallas, Texas, but I am originally from Sweden. I am married to Claudia, and we have three children. I have two blogs. The first feature the crazy adventures of our Leonberger Le Bronco von der Löwenhöhle as well as information on Leonbergers. The second blog, superfactful, feature information and facts I think are very interesting. With this blog I would like to create a list of facts that are accepted as true among the experts of the field and yet disputed amongst the public or highly surprising. These facts are special and in lieu of a better word I call them super-facts.

68 thoughts on “Accents are very difficult to lose”

  1. South Africa has 12 official languages (SA sign languages was just included last year).

    Everyone here speaks with an accent. You can hear it. I can hear it. Yet I’ve been asked countess times where am I from (lives here over 20 years) because of my accent.

    I love my accent. It is part of my cultural heritage.

    Great article.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Thank you so much Patricia for your very kind comment. 12 official languages is a lot. Sweden has 5 official languages. However, a linguist told me that I am not really speaking Swedish but Norrlandish (northern Swedish), which is different enough from Swedish to be its own language, well according to him. So that would be another language.

      You have a very good way of looking at things. Accents are difficult to get rid of but should we really work that hard to get rid of it? I am not ready for years of speech therapy. I am learning French and my accent in French is very Swedish according to my teacher. I sound completely different from the other American students. I think that is funny. I am stuck with the sounds I learned in my childhood.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  2. Hi Thomas —  I for one, like your accent. Think of it just as part of the brand — like Schwarzenegger. And at present, it gives you much more credibility than an American accent! Best, Ben

    Bennett Voylesbennettvoyles.de Tel.  +49 151 62967276 Winterfeldtstr. 39 10781 Berlin, Germany

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Yes that is interesting. Could it be that because he learned English in Austria and Sweden and that somehow that created his accent? I don’t know. As for me, I grew up in Sweden, and my French teacher tells me I have strong Swedish accent in French.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  4. It’s almost impossible to lose accents, but the degree of accent can vary depending on the person’s native language. For instance, I notice that Spanish and Italian people usually keep a strong accent in English no matter how many years or decades they are frequently speaking it. It’s related to their native pronunciation of words, including tongue twists and throat movements—something learned and rooted since early childhood. Anyway, accents are not a problem; they denote bilingual (at least) skills, which is not for everyone. I see it as a plus! Thank you for sharing, Thomas! Light and blessings to you*

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. That is interesting information. I think that strong accents when speaking English is common in many other languages as well. I’ve also heard that “tongue twists and throat movements—something learned and rooted since early childhood” is important to pronunciation of words, as well as the growing brain. That’s why you usually keep the accent unless you do some serious speech therapy. I know a Swedish actor (Dolph Lundgren) who hired speech therapists for that purpose. Someone who watched an interview with him told me that he hired a therapist who teaches deaf people how to speak, but I have not been able to verify that via google. He could barely speak Swedish afterwards. Light and blessings to you as well.

      Like

      Reply

  5. HI Thomas, most people I work with are not English first language speakers. Many have heavy accents, and I am used to the plethora of different accents and don’t struggle to understand most people. However, people from French speaking or Portuguese speaking Africa are another story. Their accents are different and strong and it can be hard to understand what they are saying sometimes. Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that I can always tell a non-English first language writer even when their English is perfect. It is they way they use the language. When you are taught a language at school, you are taught a ‘higher’ version of that language than people use in ordinary daily speech. This makes the flow of their writing in books, articles and other communications a bit more stilted for want of another word. It’s a bit unnatural to an English native speaker. Does that make sense to you?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. That is quite interesting information. I’ve read somewhere that AI can tell from even perfectly fine English writing that the person is not a native English speaker. I did not know people could figure that out too when listening. Maybe it is because you are taught a ‘higher’ version of English like you say and maybe something else too. During the first few years in the US I wrote a lot of research papers and my advisor told me that I tended to write English sentences so that the sentence structure sounded German. It wasn’t German, it was Swedish, but he thought it was like German. It wasn’t entirely wrong, but it just did not sound right and the verbs were often in an awkward place. He went through my papers and fixed several sentences. Perhaps the grammar or sentence construction in the native language might linger? I am just speculating.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Hi Thomas, I think your advisor may have been correct. I upset one of my colleagues a great deal when I said that I could tell that he was English second language. He prided himself on perfect English. It was, but no-one actually speaks for writes like that – smile! I wasn’t meaning it negatively, btw. It can just be a bit clunky in dialogue in books, but I admire anyone who learns to speak another language well. This is something I have not done. Although I can understand Afrikaans reasonably well, I hesitate to speak it.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

      1. I thought you had read it, my apologies. It is about the Boer war and gives a lot of insight into why there was so much resentment by the Afrikaners towards the English speaking of SA. The British behaved horrendously and have so much to answer for. It is a war book though and also has a paranormal element so it may not be your cup of tea. If you prefer a book that’s just about the war, Deneys Reitz wrote memoires about this war, and they are very good. His books are available from Amazon.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  6. Interesting that your ingrained, born with accent stays with you in some form forever. I love hearing different accents, and really am impressed with people who know more than one language. I took French for a couple of years in school, and we hear Spanish here all the time, but I’ll always sound like a Texan. haha 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Yes I think different accents / dialects within the same language is pretty difficult to shake as well. The type of Swedish is speak is called Norrlandish and I always sound Norrlandish. I think it is difficult to speak like a Stockholm person. But maybe it is a little easier if it is the same language or almost the same language. When I visited Norway in September I tried speaking Swedish to the Norwegian speech recognition answering machine and it did not understand me. Then I tried imitating Norwegian and it worked. I must have sounded like a Norwegian. A Norwegian human wouldn’t be fooled though, but he would easily understand Swedish. Maybe you could try to sound like you are from New Joysee (New Jersey) a little bit, at least to a machine.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  7. I’d say I don’t mind accents, but there are those I just can’t understand the words through them! There is one Formula 1 announcer I really struggle to figure out what the heck s/he is saying! Churchill’s famous words come to mind–““England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”–or George Bernard Shaw said it first albeit slightly differently.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. You are right, some accents are really difficult to understand. We have a girl from Brazil in our French class and I cannot understand her French, but the teacher usually does (but he struggles). I think it is often harder when you have to go through two accents, your own and someone elses, or maybe that’s just me. I seem to have a harder time understanding a Chinese accent (speaking English) than most Americans do. On the other hand when someone Swedish or Norwegian speak English with a strong accent I have an easier time understanding it than a native English speaker. Churchill said a lot of clever and funny things.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    1. Yes you are right. My wife left France when she was 11 years old and she does not have an accent in English, and she is fluent in French. I on the other hand speak with an accent. Kids with parents who teach their children English, or another second language, at a very early age, are often able to speak without an accent. I’ve seen that.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  9. growing up moving around a lot, I was always told I had an accent, no matter where I was. so in a way, what is an accent? I adore accents am am especially partial to my husband’s.

    whether we hear someone’s accent depends on quite a lot of things, too. people with accents are often perfectionists who are far too hard on themselves. for me, communication is everything and the only thing that matters. language is quite a inexact tool under the best of circumstances. seriously, people who have a problem with accents are somewhere within the spectrum of: bigots, unimaginative, only know english, or idiots

    do dogs have accents or are they just little vs big body voices? and why do they understand what we say but we don’t understand what they say?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I can understand that. My father-in-law speaks seven languages, and he claims he has an accent in every language. I am glad you like accents. It is difficult when you speak to people who are bothered by them. I grew up in a place where everyone spoke Norrlandish, a Swedish northern dialect some say is its own language. It was very countryside and there were no foreigners there, and Swedes from Stockholm or southern Sweden rarely came up there. Well, there were some Finnish speaking people, but in general accents were something strange to me. Then I grew up, met people who were not like myself, and I went to the University and to the US, and now accents are all around me and like them. But I easily get embarrassed when I think there are people listening to me speaking English who do not like accents.

      I think dogs communicate very well through body language. Our Rollo just came over and scratched my wife’s knee, and then he turned around facing the bedroom. He was showing her that he wanted to go to the bedroom and wanted her to follow. The bed in the bedroom is his safety spot when a storm is brewing. Just 10 minutes later it started thundering.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Whether people like which accent is sadly very political and classist. Here people are enamored of anything British so it was amusing and eye opening that in Iran that accent is considered ugly. So you probably now have now have a Swedish Tex accent hehe

        Verbal language is a crude tool. Maybe dogs are smarter than us to not even bother with it?

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

    2. It does not surprise me that a British accent sounds ugly in some languages like Farsi. Depending on our language we feel different things when we hear different sounds and we even hear different things according to one of the articles I referenced above. I think the problem is when we extrapolate our local perspective onto the rest of the world. An American who loves a British accent is fine, but he should not expect others to feel or even hear the same thing.

      Local perspectives can really mess with us, even with regards to facts. Ask a Texan what the second secondary language after English is and he’ll tell you that it is self-evidently Spanish because in Texas bilingual pretty much means someone who speaks Spanish. However, Spanish is #8 in the world as a secondary language. The Texan is not going to believe you if you tell him that. In addition he may not believe you if you say that Texas is smaller than Alaska.

      I think verbal communication has been very beneficial as well as harmful to us humans. Maybe one reason we love dogs so much is that they don’t express themselves verbally. I can imagine how Rollo would insult me if he could, or maybe he would just tell me how much he loved me, or maybe both.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    4. Yes things would certainly be different if the could talk. Sometimes it almost feels like they can talk. Today we removed the stool that we put by our oldest son’s bed. Rollo used that stool to jump up on the bed. He likes to be on that bed. However, our son and his wife came to visit us today for Thanksgiving and we did not want Rollo to use his bed. Well, Rollo was not happy with this and he came to me and scratch my leg and then he walked over to where the stool used to be. He was telling me to put the stool back. I explained to him in English that we couldn’t do that. I am not sure how much he understood but he accepted it. He makes himself understood.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. What a great story! Great for a post too! I often feel like my dog thinks I’m too easily impressed by her smarts and understanding of human language as well as ability to mind read and hypnotize us 🐶😝

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  10. Great post Thomas. Me and a friend were discussing this not too long ago. It is said that if a child emigrates, usually up to and around twelve years old, they can lose the accent. My bestie was born in Australia and moved to Canada at aged seven. Her siblings were in their mid and late teens. She has no accent, but they still do! 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  11. My wife would probably deny it, but when I met her she had a mild Long Island accent (“noin” for “nine”, “draw” for “drawer”, etc.). 30-odd years later, after living in upstate New York and then in Southern California, she doesn’t have that accent anymore. But I wonder if I still sound like an upstate New Yorker … 🤔

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  12. Very enlightening post, Thomas. I had no idea that accents remain, if only slightly. I tried to listen to your accent, but the link would not load on my computer. Bummer. I am amazed by your statistics. Living in the U.S. all my life, I wrongly assumed Spanish would be the most popular second language.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. Thank you so much Gwen. That is funny, that the link wouldn’t load. I had to check that I posted the right link, but it loaded on my computer. Anyway, when I was young and lived in Sweden I thought German was the most popular second language after English but it is not even on the list. I guess it is easy to extrapolate from your local environment. In Sweden German was the most popular second language to learn after English. I’ve forgotten almost all of my German. Now I focus on French.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
  13. Pingback: Super Fact Page Added to Superfactful – Leonberger Life

    1. I have not taken a deep dive into the topic but based on what I’ve read and my personal experience it is the sounds that does not exist or are different in the new versus childhood language that’s the toughest to lose/change. My native language Swedish has a few sounds that does not exist in English and English has a few sounds that does not exist in Swedish (“th”e, “th”in). When you learn to speak for the first time your face muscles and your brain adapt to the sounds in your native language. Changing those sounds as an adult is very difficult. That is also why speakers of non Indo-European language (Chinese, Japanese) often have the hardest time speaking English without an accent. It is not just that it is difficult to make those different sounds, it also that you don’t hear them. You can’t hear that you are making the wrong sound.

      Like

      Reply

      1. I’d say in terms of accents, vowels (such as ø, œ, ö, ü/y, and the American English labialized alveolar approximant) are harder to hear, and fricatives (such as postalveolar and velar) and trills (such as alveolar and uvular trill) are easier to hear but harder to produce. Correct?
        What about the rhythm in which a language is spoken? Ever heard of syllable-timed, mora-timed, and stress-timed?
        When Spanish speakers speak English or German as a second language, they tend to speak it with an equal time between syllables. When English-speakers speak Spanish, they tend to time the syllables according to stress. Do they not?

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. I do not know much about some of the things you mention, but you are right, there are different rhythms, timing between syllables, emphasis, intonation and pitch. Norwegian and Swedish have a lot of similar words but different intonation and pitch. That adds to the difficulty of sounding like a native.

          Like

          Reply

              1. They can’t hear that they are making the wrong sound – very surprising to many including me.

                Why is it that you can’t hear that you are making the wrong sound when you are speaking, yet when you listen to a recording of you speaking, then you can hear that you made the wrong sound? Is that true for most all people with an accent? It has to do with bone conduction vs. air conduction, right? Why is it that you can’t hear via bone conduction that you are making the wrong sound, but you can via air conduction? Is that true for most all people? When you are speaking, there’s both bone and air conduction but when you listen to yourself speak in a recording, there’s only air conduction. When you are speaking, does the bone conduction overwhelm the air conduction?

                Liked by 1 person

                Reply

                1. That is a good question I don’t know the answer to. I can only speak for myself. I grew up speaking Swedish and therefore I was not trained (my brain was not train) to listen for certain sounds in English. It is especially difficult to hear yourself. It wasn’t (isn’t) impossible me for me to differentiate two similar English sounds, but difficult, whilst it is easy for a native English speaker.

                  I am currently learning French and sometimes when I say things my French teacher corrects me and I feel like, “that’s what I said”. The opposite is also true. I have a hard time saying the French ‘u’ excatly right so I just use the Swedish ‘y’. She does not hear the difference and does not complain because she does not know the Swedish ‘y’. They are very similar though.

                  Like

                  Reply

    1. Yes you are probably correct. Accents become more ingrained as you age. My father-in-law speaks seven languages but he claims to have an accent in all of them. I have a Swedish accent in English, not a strong one, but I have a more pronounced Swedish accent when I speak French.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Neuroplasticity continues to decrease all the way to death?

        Speaking of elderly, I could suggest to you a super-fact “It is impossible to die of old age.” On whether it’s true that people don’t die just because they are old, but there is always a cause of death. It’s just that the common causes of death become more likely to get older. Increasing risk of heart disease, cancer, Alzhemier’s, etc.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        2. Hello World Questioner. A comment you made went into the spam, sometimes non-spam goes in the spam. I released it but I did not note where it went and now I can’t find your comment. Do you mind telling me where it is. As long as the comment does not go in spam I’ll get an email so it should work next time.

          Like

          Reply

    1. Here is another surprise. My daughter who was born in the US and speaks without an accent claimed that I had no accent, even though I do, when she was younger (maybe 12-13). She changed her mind as she got older.

      Like

      Reply

        1. I think that in most cases you can hear the difference at least as long as someone else is speaking or yiou listen to a recording of your own voice. It is harder to hear the difference while you are talking. In some cases like my French teacher, that I mentioned, some foreign sounds that are close but not the same can’t even be distinguished by someone else.

          Like

          Reply

Leave a reply to Monkey's Tale Cancel reply