My kids are natively bilingual, with their mother speaking to them in Spanish¹ and me in English from infancy. They're about to be 8 and are curious about other languages (my son wants to learn French, my daughter Japanese). It's interesting to see how they have fairly different personalities depending on their linguistic context. In English, my daughter is more extroverted, my son more introverted, the reverse is the case in Spanish. I don't think it's a matter of comfort in the languages—my son has had a strong attention to gradations of meaning between words in both languages. I’m looking forward to seeing how their linguistic skills develop as they get older. If it weren’t for Covid, they would have started French classes on weekends last year, but maybe we’ll get there in the next year or so. Otherwise, they may have to pick up French from visits with their Mexican/Belgian cousins.
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1. My wife is a native speaker of Spanish. Her English is accentless² and she has above-average reading/speaking/writing skills in English. She also speaks French.³
2. Mostly. Schwas still trip her up from time to time.
3. Most of her family is at least trilingual, speaking English, Spanish and one other language. I think her cousin with the most languages has five: English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. At his sister's wedding, he gave a toast in French with a flawless accent⁴ that blew me away. I often joke that I almost speak one language, but I haven't learned all the words in English yet. I'm semi-functional in Spanish, but my kids are quick to point out that my accent is “horrible” and with my hearing loss, it’s a challenge to participate in conversations. There are a few languages I can read with a dictionary, but I don’t know that I can claim any facility in them.⁵
4. I suspected that his accent was good, but I verified it with the francophones at his sister’s wedding (she married a quadrilingual Belgian).
5. One thing I’ve found is that in general, Americans tend to overestimate their linguistic abilities and non-Americans to underestimate their skills. It’s typical that someone who took a couple years of French in high school ten years ago and hasn’t used it since will claim that they speak French. A European who says that they speak “a little” Italian will be able to function just fine in a conversation with an Italian.
This is fairly useless nitpicking in this context – he's talking about a non-native English speaker, who has learned English to the point that her accent is nearly indistinguishable from some native English accent. This is a very common, and very well understood use of accentless (in the context of non-native speakers).
This, exactly. If I would have to identify an accent it would be television news anchor, the sort of speech which lacks any distinctive regional indicators.
I did student teaching at a high school a mile and a half away from the high school I attended just outside Chicago. I remember the students (mostly Mexican-American) mocking how I said “root” (and other oo-words) where I use the short o͝o sound rather than the long o͞o sound of, e.g., boot. Everyone I grew up with (except my Mom who was born in Western Pennsylvania), pronounces these words the same as I do, but the changes in the demographics of the area (from mostly Slavs, Italians and some Greeks and Serbs to mostly Latino) have also changed the micro-regional accent as well.
It is interesting to note that Barack Obama, despite his cosmopolitan upbringing, has acquired the Chicago habit of truncating a lot of vowels to schwas so he will, for example, say “tuh” for “to.” Then again, I’ve picked up a lot of L.A. regionalisms in my own speech thanks to living there for 18 years of my life (the most notable is saying freeway rather than expressway).
Interesting. I've always been confused by "accentless", and since I had only heard the term used by Americans, had always interpreted it the same uncharitable way as GP. Your interpretation makes much more sense. TIL!
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1. My wife is a native speaker of Spanish. Her English is accentless² and she has above-average reading/speaking/writing skills in English. She also speaks French.³
2. Mostly. Schwas still trip her up from time to time.
3. Most of her family is at least trilingual, speaking English, Spanish and one other language. I think her cousin with the most languages has five: English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. At his sister's wedding, he gave a toast in French with a flawless accent⁴ that blew me away. I often joke that I almost speak one language, but I haven't learned all the words in English yet. I'm semi-functional in Spanish, but my kids are quick to point out that my accent is “horrible” and with my hearing loss, it’s a challenge to participate in conversations. There are a few languages I can read with a dictionary, but I don’t know that I can claim any facility in them.⁵
4. I suspected that his accent was good, but I verified it with the francophones at his sister’s wedding (she married a quadrilingual Belgian).
5. One thing I’ve found is that in general, Americans tend to overestimate their linguistic abilities and non-Americans to underestimate their skills. It’s typical that someone who took a couple years of French in high school ten years ago and hasn’t used it since will claim that they speak French. A European who says that they speak “a little” Italian will be able to function just fine in a conversation with an Italian.