Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

For decades our foreign language teachers have been telling us that attaining a completely native or even a near-native accent is impossible, and I’ve even known a select few to tell students that trying would only be in vain. But is it really impossible?

We tend to see accents as a that foreigners have, so why don’t we uncover the mystery once and for all? Let’s use linguistics to rethink the accent as it is defined in popular culture, and explore how we can leverage accents to better learn foreign languages. With science, we just might perfect our accents after all.

Phonetics and Phonology

Popular culture defines an accent as a specific way of speaking particular to a group of speakers that often serves as an indicator of social status and country of origin. This is, of course, a wholly valid definition of what an accent does, but lacks insight into what it is, or how and why accents differ.

There are two linguistic disciplines in particular that give us this insight we: phonetics and phonology.

Phonetics studies and describes human speech sounds (phones). Phonology creates categorical groupings (phonemes) of phones that communicate the same meaning in the context of a specific language.

Every sound that the human articulatory system can produce is described by phonetics as an individual phone, and is associated with a specific mapping of articulatory organs (teeth, tongue, lips, etc.) and their role in the phone’s creation, as well as specific sounds properties (aspiration, voice, etc.). These phones are then taken and categorized into phonemes by phonology.

Phonemes are language specific collections of all of the sounds understood as having the same meaning in a specific language. A practical example: the Spanish-style rolled R, the German guttural R, and the standard English R sounds are all distinct, separate phones. In fact, all three phones are produced three distinctly different ways (alveolar trill, uvular fricative, and alveolar approximant respectively). English spoken with German guttural Rs or Spanish rolled Rs, however, is completely understandable: they are all understood as the letter R, and as such are all categorized into the same phoneme.

You can think of phonemes as the letters in the alphabet of any given language, and phones as all of the sounds that you can make that are understood as particular letters (this is, of course, ignoring the fact that combinations of letters can represent completely separate phonemes, but for simplicity’s sake, we will refer to phonemes and letters as being the same throughout this article).

Redefining the Accent

The alphabet (or collection of phonemes) belongs to the foundation of any language. Without the alphabet there can be no lexicon (vocabulary), and without a lexicon, grammatical structures prove to be surprisingly ineffective. The collection of phones that a speaker uses to realize the alphabet, however, are interchangeable.

These interchangeable collections of phones (or phone-vocabularies) are known as accents.

The accent of any given language is by no means set in stone. Many languages have a standardized accent that is shared by most of its speakers, but other languages multiple standardizations due to geography (see Standard German Phonology and Dialectal Variations in Spanish Phonology respectively).

But even highly standardized languages like German can have a variety of dialects, each with their own accent (see Austrian German, Swiss German, Texas German). As it turns out, a language can be spoken and understood with any accent that satisfies its phoneme requirements, although accents that vary greatly from a language’s “standard accent” (thick accents) can be difficult for even native speakers to understand.

English, a highly international language, is the mother to potentially hundreds of different accents spoken daily around the globe. Here is a young man demonstrating 67 of them.

Now that we’ve newly defined the accent, let’s see how we can use it to learn languages more effectively.

The Role of Accents in Language Learning

Map of the Broca’s and Wernicke’s Areas. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

There are two highly interconnected areas of the brain responsible for language comprehension and production: the Wernicke’s area and the Broca’s area, respectively.

In order for the Wernicke’s area to be able to process speech sounds and create meaning out of chains of phones, it must distinguish them from one another. You couldn’t give somebody your phone number without telling them the individual digits. A large part of what we do when learning our native language is commit all of the phones of our native language to memory so that they can be understood and, later, reproduced.

Essentially, a “phone-filter” is created, through which all sounds need to pass through to be processed in our brains, where incoming phones are sorted into phonemes for further processing: in order to understand words, you have to first be able to pick out each individual sound, or letter, that goes into it.

Any unfamiliar phones are sorted into the “best-guess” phoneme of the filter, or the one that is most similar to it. This approximate behavior is what allows us to understand foreign accents. The downside to this, however, is that completely foreign phones may be filtered into the wrong phonemes, or worse, completely ignored. This poses a problem to language learners whose target language is phonologically very different to their native language, especially when very similar phones belong to the same phoneme in the target language.

For these reasons, training your phone-filter (your ear) is critical when learning a new language. Being able to recognize each phone of a language will greatly improve a language learner’s comprehension skills.

And, as mentioned above, because the Wernicke’s area is so highly interconnected to the Broca’s area, improved recognition of speech sounds could lead to improved language production skills.

Native Accents are Attainable

Fortunately for us, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have leveled the articulatory playing field, theoretically enabling all humans to pronounce all human-pronounceable sounds. Simply put, you are anatomically no different than the native speakers of your target language, and can theoretically pronounce all of the phones that they can.

In the context of our newly defined accent, this means that you are exactly as capable of speaking “like a native” as the natives are themselves. Remember how we said that speech sounds are produced physically? There is nothing special about an accent: it is simply created by pronouncing differing phones to realize phonemes. By exactly replicating the physical manner in which a native speaker produces the sounds (which can largely be found online, especially on Wikipedia), you can attain a “native accent” as well.

If you want to start speaking like a native, you have to use their phone-vocabulary.

There is, however, a caveat. The process of learning all of the speech sounds of a language and committing them to muscle memory is a great task that can take years to perfect. Furthermore, if you have already been speaking the language for a significant amount of time, you will have a large amount of “unlearning” to do, which could be even more time consuming.

Without a doubt, attaining a native or near-native accent in a foreign language is difficult, but is by no means impossible.

Why it Matters

Individualism is important, of course, and some see more value in being an individual than needing to perfect the accent of the language that they are learning. They see their own accent as a proud sign of where they come from and who they are, and there is nothing wrong with that.

However, many people want to take their language skills to the next level, be taken more seriously in the country of their target language, or even just challenge themselves to be the best.

Perfecting the accent of your target language can lead to a better understanding of it, and can help you better fit in in countries where your target language is spoken. And, as an added bonus, a near-native is a great conversation piece with natives.

Tips for the Perfect Accent

Start practicing speech sounds as early as possible: the less unlearning you need to do, the more smooth the process will be.

Search Wikipedia for the phonology of your target language in order to find a comprehensive list of all of the consonants and vowels you’ll need to learn.

Practice with a native speaker and have them consciously evaluate exactly how they’re producing sounds to help you.

Research different characteristics of speech sounds, like points of articulation, voice, aspiration, etc. All of these you will find in a basic introduction to phonetics course like this one.

Further Reading