The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick

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’.

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Citation

Weinberger, Steven H.. 37. What Causes Foreign Accents?. The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 179-182 Jul 2019. ISBN 9781781798553. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=38157. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.38157. Jul 2019

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