The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
37. What Causes Foreign Accents?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Steven H. Weinberger [+]
George Mason University
Steven H. Weinberger is Associate Professor and Director of the Linguistics program at George Mason University in Virginia. He teaches courses in phonetics, phonology, and second language acquisition. His principal research deals with language sound systems and foreign accents. He is co-editor of Interlanguage Phonology: The Acquisition of a Second Language Sound System (1987), and he is the founder and curator of the Speech Accent Archive (http://accent.gmu.edu/), a Web database of thousands of different accents in English.
Description
Foreign accents have been around for as long as humans have had language. As humans, we immediately notice them, and as linguists, we find them theoretically interesting. While many factors influence foreign accents, much of the answer lies in something linguists call ‘cross-linguistic interference’.