Moving to a different country or learning another language can be a refreshing and challenging experience.
Yet, despite a person’s best attempts, experts say that past childhood, there will almost always be signs that hint at the fact that you’re not a local or native speaker.
The giveaway? Usually, an accent.
According to Dr. Charles Boberg, a professor at McGill University’s Department of Linguistics, humans have what is called a “critical period” of language learning.
This is the time when learning a language – or two or three or more – is “easy,” usually leading to full fluency or “native-speaker status.”
“Core elements of grammar are acquired virtually without effort in the first years of life, based mostly on the model of the parents' language,” he explains. “As children move from home into their peer group, as they enter school…they transition to learning the community language.”
This includes, according to Boberg, the difference between formal and informal speech, like slang, and observing how people communicate in different social situations.
Dr. Marc Pell, a James McGill professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University, seconds this assessment, adding that a person’s “critical period” usually ends before early adolescence.
“The idea is that by the time you’re nine or 10 years old, we’d no longer have the ability to learn a new language in exactly the way a native speaker would produce it,” he said. “There is sort of a maturation of those muscles and their connections with the brain.”
This is why, the experts agree, adults – or even older teens – who move from one place to another, and subsequently one language or accent to another, rarely become native speakers of their new environment’s community language.
“Talking is hard. It’s something we have to learn in practice,” said Pell. “Infants spend a few years, the first two, three years of life, basically devoted to learning how to talk.”
As such, learning languages becomes progressively harder as we age.
“Presumably, humans are supposed to have already learned language by this time, so the brain begins to prioritize other types of learning and development, like sexual reproduction and adult social and vocational skills,” Boberg notes. “The later they make the transition, the less fluent they generally are. Thus, we hear immigrants who came as adults and retain a foreign accent for the rest of their lives, even after living in their new country for 30, 40 years.”
Physical training
As we grow up, the experts explain, we all learn how to use the muscles in our faces and throats to formulate specific shapes and make different sounds.
Talking isn’t just about stringing words together, Pell says; it’s a “complex series of actions.”
“How to move, how to breathe properly; even infants, when they start to speak, they don’t control their breathing in a way that we do,” he said. “You learn to move the vocal folds, to move the lips and the articulators.”
Though one’s ability to master new skills can be “very, very good,” says Pell, “we might still sound slightly non-native.”
This is because there are certain sounds in each language that don’t necessarily exist in our own.
Pell gives the example of the letter ‘S.’
“You would think there’s one ‘S.’ There are many different ‘S’s,” he said. “When you try to learn this next language, you produce it [the letter ‘S’] in the way you learned in your native language, but it’s not quite the same.”
Other examples of minute pronunciation include the rolling ‘R’ in Spanish or the ‘TH’ in English.
“Once the brain and vocal apparatus are set to produce the sounds of the native language at a young age; to change those patterns in later life is very difficult, even if an immigrant can learn a large stock of new vocabulary and a fairly good command of the grammar,” adds Boberg.
Societal constraints
As a result, Pell points out that language is one of the easiest ways people “know you’re an outsider.”
“Within less than a second, I mean, 200 milliseconds – this is actual research, less than a second – we can detect a person’s accent,” he said. “What the brain does is we quickly categorize the person as being part of our group, so they sound like me, or they’re not part of my group.”
Historically, Pell says we tend to favour people who are part of our community because we believe they would be more likely to help us.
“What the brain does, it quickly processes the accent, and says, ‘Ah, this person is not like me. This person’s not from my group,‘” he said. “But often, we’re wrong because we’re actually very, very bad at guessing people’s accents.”
Societally, we characterize certain accents as good or bad.
“We think, ‘Ah, that sounds like a French speaker. Oh, that sounds like that person might be Chinese,’” Pell explains. “We use that information; we automatically generate these inferences about who that speaker is. It’s a very, very automatic and quick thing we do to everyone.”
That quick-button judgment doesn’t come without consequences.
Pell gives the example of someone speaking with what could sound like an Eastern European accent.
“If I have a certain idea about someone from Eastern Europe, whether it’s good or bad, I’m going to apply that to that person,” he said. “I’m going to stereotype that person.”
Pell points out that newcomers to a country are generally aware of their “outsiderness,” and how they are received can affect how well they then integrate into a society.
“You would ask anyone who has an accent; they know that this has an impact on their interactions and sometimes how they’re treated by certain people,” he said. “When we hear a foreign accent, even if we don’t know where it’s from, the general tendency is to think that person is less competent or less trustworthy.”
He says people often believe that if a person can’t master “how we speak here,” they must not be good at, well, anything.
“That’s not fair. So, if someone tries to reduce the strength of their accent to avoid those types of situations, I understand that,” he said. “I think it’s sad because nobody wants to eliminate or sort of reduce aspects of their identity, but they see that it impacts their interactions with other people.”
