Accent (sociolinguistics)

Accent denotes the - mostly unconscious and unintentional - Transfer of pronunciation habits of the first or native language or the primary language used on a later learned ( Foreign Language) or less used language. The differences can affect the sound shaping, intonation, stress patterns and prosody.

Almost all people who learn a foreign language as adolescents or adults, they speak with an accent. For example, recognizes a German native German speaking French or Italians mostly on her accent. One speaks of German with a French accent, German with Italian accent, English with a German accent, etc. plays an important role in the inability to certain sounds (eg umlauts "ö " and " ü", nasal vowels or the English " th " ), which does not exist in the native language of a speaker to produce loud pure, as a result of non-use of the necessary muscles ( dyslalia ).

People who due to special circumstances a foreign language much more use than their mother tongue, often develop an accent in the native language. This often happens with immigrant children, but also adults who live abroad for decades with a foreign partner with whom they communicate in the local language. The pronunciation habits of a foreign language are transmitted unintentionally in this case in the native language. Relatively rare is the " Foreign Accent Syndrome" before, in which similar by an illness, surgery the manner of speaking local changes so that they are held for foreigners.

Ratio of accent and dialect

On the one hand they speak also within one language area of an accent when the regional dialect of the speaker when speaking of the high-level language is recognizable. And thus you see, for example, standard German -speaking North German or Bavaria often at their more or less pronounced accent. This generally applies to all dialects of a language area, transferred their spokespersons their pronunciation habits on the high-level languages ​​.

On the other hand, the term accent is different from that of the dialect. The accent denotes the (usually unintended ) transfer of pronunciation habits in a foreign language or the high-level language, while the term dialect features a local form of language that has a different from the high language pronunciation, and partly own grammatical structures and a different vocabulary.

Accent and language teaching

The language- learning methods that give systematic attention to the avoidance of an accent, audiolinguale include methods such as the Pimsleur method.