Accent Attack
Help in understanding English accents.
Have you ever wondered what a Korean person speaking English sounds like? What about a South African? Or someone from Mexico? Well, now you can hear hundreds of accents at the “The Speech Accent Archive”– an online database of native and non-native speakers of English.

The project is managed by the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA. The university started collecting recordings in 1999 and it now has 1,300. Every contributor has to record the following paragraph:

“Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.”

The paragraph may not be particularly natural English – it’s hard to imagine anyone saying it in real life – but it does contain most of the vowel and consonant sounds of Standard American English.

Analysis of the accents is producing some interesting information. “All speakers are slightly different from each other, and that is interesting in itself,” says Steven Weinberger, associate professor and director of linguistics at the university, who is also the administrator of the archive.” However, the database also shows how systematic accents are, and how there are similarities among groups. For example, all French speakers have [bad word] characteristics that make their accent predictable, as will all Mandarin Chinese speakers, and Swahili speakers, and so on.

The archive clearly also shows how difficult it is for non- natives to acquire native-level pronunciation. It appears that the age of 6 is the cut-off point, and that after that, it’s extremely difficult to master pronunciation. As Weinberger explains, “So, a person – let's say Korean – who starts learning English at the age of 11, and lives in the USA for 20 years speaking English will still have a Korean accent. But a Korean who starts her English at the age of four, and then moves to the USA and lives there for five years, will not have a Korean accent. So, it’s the age of onset, not the length of exposure, that’s [bad word] ”

When [bad word] to pronunciation, very few learners will reach native-speaker level. However, that doesn’t matter, because the most important thing is being able to produce language that others can understand.