Why We Keep an Accent (and How to Fix It)
Introduction : Why We Keep an Accent (and How to Fix It)
Let’s keep this simple. In the video above, Etienne with Ceci est la France answers a common question: Why do we keep an accent when we speak a new language? It really comes down to three trainable things.
1) Your mouth doesn’t know some sounds yet
If a sound doesn’t exist in your native language, your brain swaps in the closest thing it knows.
That “substitution” is your accent. In the video, the English word those is hard without the
voiced dental fricative /ð/.
30-second drill
Lightly touch your tongue to your upper teeth; let air pass while voicing: ð-ð-ð. Alternate doe/those slowly, then at normal speed.
2) You apply your native reading rules to new words
The alphabet tricks us. We see familiar letters and our brain reuses home-language rules. That’s how días becomes “dee-ass,” or French words get read with English values.
Spot-the-trap checklist
- Same letter, different sound? (e.g., j in Spanish vs. French vs. English)
- Do accents change quality/length? (á/à/â/ä)
- Silent endings or liaison in French?
3) Your stress & rhythm land on the wrong syllables
Even with perfect sounds, boosting the wrong syllable makes words hard to recognize. The Japanese example in the video works only when the emphasis pattern matches native rhythm.
45-second shadowing loop
- Listen once for rhythm only. Tap the beat.
- Repeat with the same loud/soft pattern.
- Record yourself; compare the contour.
Exact transcript (kept for reference)
Hello everyone, it's Etienne from Ceci est la France. Nice to see you again. Well, you probably didn't understand what I meant because of my French accent. And that leads to a question. Why do we have an accent when we speak a foreign language, especially when we start learning it?
Well, there are three reasons for this and I'm going to give you for each reason an example taken from a different language so that you can understand more clearly. Uh listen to the first word I'm going to tell you. It's an English word.
Those those things over there. Did you recognize which word I was trying to say? Well, you probably didn't because of reason number one. I try to mean those as in those things over there. And the reason why you probably didn't understand it is because I was not able to simply produce the soundthe in English. And so this is the first reason why you have an accent in a language.
It's because you don't know how to pronounce certain sounds that exist in the language you're learning and that do not in the language that you initially speak. That's reason number one. Reason number two, listen this time a word in Spanish.
Did you understand? I try to mean which means day or work day in Spanish. And the second reason why you have an accent is because of what I just did. I applied reading rules that exist in French onto a Spanish word. And this is something that we also tend to do a lot, especially if you come from a language that uses an alphabet that is Latin, ABC, ABC, D. We are readers. We learn to read from an early age. And we learn a lot of words by learning them visually first. And so what we tend to do when we read a word is to figure how to pronounce it with our own reading rules instead of the reading rules that are applied in the language that we're trying to learn. So that's reason number two. For reason number three, I'm going to take a Japanese word this time.
The reason why you did not understand this word is this time because I put an emphasis on the wrong syllables. In most languages, not so much in French, but we'll talk about this in another video.
In most languages, some words demand that we put an emphasis on certain syllables and that we decrease the pace or the intensity of the others. So instead of saying in Japanese, I should have said and decreasing the intensity with which I pronounce instead of increasing it in the first example.
This is the third reason why you have an accent when you try to learn a foreign language because you apply wrong emphasis on wrong syllables.
Test your accent - live
Put these three ideas into practice right now. Our Live French Pronunciation Test shows you exactly which area to train: new sounds, reading rules, or stress/flow. Pass the test live with a native French teacher and get detail results about your pronunciation and how to improve for fast results.
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