What causes a "foreign" accent?

ANYONE can have an "accent" when speaking a second language. Speech is a series of motor movements which create sound patterns.  These movements and the sound patterns they create are very different in different languages.

EVERYONE who was first exposed to a second language after the age of four or five will speak it with an "accent."

There are three elements that create your accent:

• You use the sounds specific to your native language when you speak the second language.

• You use the intonation and melodic patterns of your native language when you speak the second language.

• You use the same degree of muscle tension and muscle movements of the first language even though speakers of the second language use their facial muscles differently.

What exactly is "intonation?"

• Intonation refers to the music and rhythms of speaking.

• A Stressed syllable can create meaning or confusion! For example, "inVAlid" means not valid or not true, but an "INvalid" refers to a sick person who cannot lead a normally active life. If you ask for "ORGnick" bread, your American listener will not understand that you are thinking about "orGANic" bread.

• Pitch refers to the rise and fall of your voice to indicate the important word in a message. The rising tone is also usually longer and louder: We are going to the LECTURE tonight." (Not the movies.) "We are going to the lecture TONIGHT!" (Not tomorrow.)

• American English has 11 systematic rules for syllable stress. Typically, American speakers have no idea of what these rules are; they learned them unconsciously when they were very young children by imitating others.

But I have lived in the US for a long time and I speak English fluently! Why does my accent persist?

Speech is an "overlaid" function.

The entire speech mechanism is part of a system that is used in an automatic or habitual way! SPEECH refers to the sounds you articulate using your voice (lungs, vocal cords), tongue, teeth, oral cavity or mouth and your nasal cavities in the nose.

Your lungs, your vocal cords, mouth, teeth, tongue actually have a more important function than speech. Their primary function is to enable you to BREATHE, EAT and DRINK.

Speech movements are rapidly coordinated.

In the normal flow of speech, each separate sound or "phoneme" is articulated in 1/20^th of a second. The word "speech" actually has FOUR separate sounds even though it is one syllable in length!

Speech is designed to happen automatically.

You normally don't pay attention to how you breathe, eat or drink. It is also not natural to pay attention to how you are speaking.

Speech patterns are learned when very young children imitate the adults around them.

Little children absorb both the meanings and the speech patterns of the language they hear.

What is the difference between speech and language?

• Language is the symbol system shared by a specific community. It can be oral, written or signed.

• Speech refers to the sounds articulated by the speech mechanism. These create "auditory patterns" that immediately have meaning to the listener who uses that language unless the auditory patterns are distorted by the speaker's foreign accent.