Published on March 22nd, 2018 - Do you know anybody with an accent? Maybe someone from out of the country that doesn't seem to have grasped the pronunciation of certain words, or it could be your cousin or aunt or neighbor that used to live in the south and came back speaking like they do down there. Did anybody come to mind? Well, guess what, even you have an accent! We all do. And the good news is: that's more than okay!
The way we talk always varies. And we're not only referring to the times when we try to speak in a different language, but even when using our own native tongue we may have a particular intonation. At some point in life, we have all surely found a person that seems to skip a letter, or that finishes words with an "-a" instead of "-er".
This happens on different levels. Sometimes it is almost unnoticeable, and others we have to stop for a second and ask our brain to reprocess what we just heard, just to make sure that we got it right. Now, allow us explain these stages.
Let's start with the basics: what is an accent? According to the Oxford Dictionary, it is "a distinctive way of pronouncing a language, especially one associated with a particular country, area, or social class". In other words, it simply says that the way we speak is conditioned by where we are from. Which leads us to the first "kind" of accent, and the easiest one to detect: the foreign.
The Foreign Accent
is a marvelous sociolinguistic phenomenon, mixed with biological anthropology. It begins with the mere fact that the human bone structure has evolved differently around the world. That's right. If a person can't roll their 'r's, which is one of the most common problems when learning Spanish, it's because their palate has molded in a particular frame that contrasts with native Spanish speakers', and vice versa.Take a look at celebrities such as Antonio Banderas or SofiaVergara. They entered showbiz, an English dominated field, with a very strong accent, and they are not trying to hide it. On the contrary, they have embraced it, made it part of their public persona, and are now actually making a lot of money because of it.
Even Stephen Colbert thinks Antonio can make anything sound sexy.
What matters here is the right articulation of the word, regardless if there is an unnecessary emphasis on a syllable or an added pitch on a vowel. This happens because the little strings that connect our brain to our mouth are wired differently, but they do their best to find a sound in our first language that best resembles the second one. The younger we are when we learn, the most flexible these strings become. That's why kids are more capable of "flipping the switch" from one language to the other.
The Native Accent
is extremely frequent, yet the hardest one to detect (by the person speaking). The development of this specific type is associated with the people we have the most contact with. A group can create a communal way of speaking without even noticing. This realization comes when they find another group who has acquired a characteristic pronunciation that differs from their own.The guys from FLAMA made this encounter happen, and the result was actually pretty funny.
We can start comparing, let's say, American and British English, or Colombian and Mexican Spanish. We know the language is the same, the inventory of available words is pretty much identical, yet they sound so different from each other when spoken. That's the major scale of the spectrum, accents can change from state to state, from city to city, from household to household.
When learning a new language, one of the first things we worry about is speaking with a "native accent" but, theoretically, there shouldn't be a problem if we emphasize a syllable instead of another, as long as we can string the right words in a grammatically correct sentence. So, let's focus on that instead of getting rid of an accent that can actually make us look exotic and attractive.
If Sofia Vergara could make it into Hollywood, you can make it through your summer vacations in Cancún.
(Photo Credit: MGN Online)
