Life as a Bilingual

Hello Francois,

I concur with your findings regarding accents, they are quite true.

Another interesting fact regarding bilinguals, is that they tend to say/think numbers in their first language - provided they received their elementary education in this language, or before they acquired their second. I affirm this from first-hand observation as I grew up in a family of bilinguals and am myself a bilingual too.

Perhaps you might want to explore this further and/or turn it into the subject of an article.

Best regards.

"There is no relationship between one's knowledge of a language and whether one has an accent in it."
I wish more people were aware of this because I feel like the contrary is the common belief. It's happened to me on several occasions with customer service. I've actually written about how when someone has heard me speak English with an accent, they've immediately assumed that I don't speak it fluently and have offered to find somebody who speaks Spanish to help me out!
I've always kind of struggled with this, but the more I read about bilingualism, the more I realize that none of this should really bother me because, in the end, accent or not, I'm completely bilingual!
Thanks for another insightful post, François!

Nowadays accents are quite a funny issue. I have met so many people who think that parents who try to teach their children a foreign language from early years will actually do them harm, because they will pass on their accent and it cannot be corrected later.
Well, there is no harm in accents. I speak English with a Bavarian accent (strange, I have never been there, but my British husband who spent some time in Germany says so) and it doesn't bother me or other people around. I always wonder how it is possible to speak English without an accent. I can spot Brits from Northern England, Sourthern England and Wales by THEIR accent, Brits themselves recognise the town of a speaker by his accent. Accents add individuality, as long as they don't create difficulties in communication, there is nothing wrong with them.

I am very curious about how our daughter's two languages influence each other in terms of phonology and whether she will take on my accented Bavarian English or her Dad's slightly Welsh English

Thank you for your comments which I read with real interest.

1. Nelida's remark that many bilinguals have a preferred language for well-learned behaviors such as counting, doing arithmetic, praying, etc. is well taken; I mention this in my earlier post, "What a bilingual's languages are used for".

2. Roxana Soto who also blogs on bilingualism (see her SpanglishBaby blog) offers an interesting testimony regarding misconceptions linked to having an accent. Her conclusion is just the one many of us would want to have.

3. Olga Williamson, who also has a very interesting blog (Bilingual Age), makes a good point. An accent may end up being a combination of accents due to the languages involved, the environments lived in, and the people one has interacted with.

Dear Professor, here I am again. Reading this post I cannot stop myself from thinking of some bilingual children I know who have a strong accent in one of their language (usually the minority language), although they have acquired both of them simultaneously and with sufficient opportunity of exposure in both languages. This goes against all neurolinguistic theories I've read so far concerning language acquisition.

What I wonder is if there are some accent that are, so to say, "dominant" over other ones. For exemple, what I notice here in Luxembourg is the dominance of French accent, which apparently is so difficoult to dissimulate in particulr with the French "r" and the nasal sounds. Are there studies to confirm my feeling?

Some language combinations are phonetically more compatible then others, English accent is also predominant over German and maybe also over French...?

I don't know, maybe every case is different and it's not possible to deduct a general rule, but I would be interested to know what you think about it.

By the way, I intend to read your last book, maybe afterwards I will have asnwers to many of my questions. Thanks anyway for you interesting blog!

It bugs me when people say my parents speak 'broken English'. They speak accented English with the cadence of another first language. They probably speak and write better English than a few natives. I guess I get this point through osmosis since I'm an immigrant raised by immigrants.

Everyone speaks English with an accent. I just speak it with a Canadian one. Its apparent enough to Americans that there are casting calls in Hollywood requesting 'No Canadian accents'. I've seen friends go away to Australia/ UK and come back with an accent. These are native English speakers going to other English speaking countries.