Is a Native-like Accent in a Foreign Language Achievable?

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”- Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

The ability and tendency to identify with other human beings plays an essential role in the development and transmission of human culture as well as language acquisition (both primary and additional language acquisition). The first step in the process is the development of a self-concept in infants and viewing others as intentional agents. The latter ability usually occurs between nine to twelve months of age.

Concerning the transmission of culture Tomasello (1999) wrote,

After they (infants) understand others as intentional agents like themselves, a whole new world of intersubjectively shared reality begins to open up. It is a world populated by material and symbolic artifacts and social practices that members of their culture, both past and present, have created for the use of others. To be able to use these artifacts as they were meant to be used, and to participate in these social practices as they were meant to be participated in, children have to be able to imagine themselves in the position of the adult users and participants as they observe them. Children now come to comprehend how ‘we’ use the artifacts and practices of our culture – what they are ‘for’ … this ability to see the self as one participant among others in an interaction is the social-cognitive basis for the infant’s ability to comprehend the kinds of socially shared events that constitute the basic joint attentional formats for the acquisition of language and other types of communication. (p. 91)

Thus, we can view natural language as a symbolically embodied social institution that arose historically from previously existing social-communicative activities and not as some bizarre genetic mutation unrelated to other aspects of cognition and social life as envisioned by Chomsky (1980) and propagated by Pinker (1994).

Language acquisition is also a process of identity construction and how a person sees him/herself in relation to the language being acquired and in relation to the speakers of that language along with their culture. Every time language learners interact in a foreign language, whether in the oral or written mode, they are engaged in identity construction and negotiation.

Wegner (2000:239) commented, “Identity is not an abstract idea or label, such as a title, and ethnic category, or a personality trait. It is a lived experience of belonging (or not belonging). A strong identity involves deep connections with others through shared histories and experiences, reciprocity, affection, and mutual commitments.”

The languages we speak and how we speak them serve to define our linguistic and cultural identities. Everyone has a dialect and speaks with an accent. It is only when the accent and dialect have strong social and political status do people feel that they do not speak with an accent.

Norton (2000: 10) stated, “To invest in a language is to invest in an identity.” Norton uses the term investment to describe the socially and historically constructed relationship of learners to the target language and how it relates to motivation for SLA.

Language is so closely tied to identity that when someone does not look like he/she should speak with a certain accent (e.g., if a person of Pakistani origin speaks with a Scottish accent) people often become suspicious or at least want to find out why it is so. Ethnicity often leads to certain assumptions about language ability in in various cultural and social environments.

In Asia, the native speaker of English is assumed to be Caucasian. In particular, native speakers of English with Asian ethnicity often face discrimination in hiring for positions teaching English in Asia (Kubota & Lin, 2009).

I have lived in Asia all most of my life (mostly in Japan 34 years). The fact that I am 191 cm blonde Caucasian often leads people to often assume that I do not speak the local language. So whether I am in Japan, China, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, or Malaysia I must constantly establish that in fact I do speak the local language before the people I am addressing will speak their mother tongue in a natural manner (no pidginization for the supposed benefit of the foreigner or resorting to broken English).

Additionally, both my sons are native speakers of Japanese. Though they do have some slight Asian features inherited from their Japanese mother, their overall appearance and names belie the fact that Japanese is their mother tongue.

However, their speech and mannerisms tend to establish immediate legitimacy as a native speaker of Japanese as long as the interlocutor is open to reading the signals (sometimes people do not see with their eyes nor listen with their ears).

In today’s modern world children are exposed to a wide variety of speech as they acquire their first language (television programs, videos, and all other sorts of audio/visual media). Nevertheless, children acquire a particular style that is emotionally significant for them. McGilchrist (2009) stressed the importance of empathetic identification in the process of acquiring language,

A child does not acquire the skill of language, and more than the skill of life, by learning rules, but by imitation, a form of emphatic identification, usually with his or her parents, or at any rate with those members of the group who are perceived as more proficient. I have suggested that such identification involves an (obviously unconscious) attempt to inhabit another person’s body, and this may sound somewhat mystical. But imitation is an attempt to be ‘like’ (in the sense of experiencing what it is ‘like’ to be) another person, and what it is ‘like’ to be that person is something that can be experienced only from the inside. Not just the acquisition of language, but the everyday business of language involves such inhabiting. Communication occurs because, in a necessarily limited, but nonetheless crucially important, sense, we come to feel what it is like to be the person who is communicating with us. This explains why we pick up another person’s speech habits or tics, even against our will. It explains many of the problems of emotional entrainment in conversation, the countertransference that occurs, not just in therapy, but in ordinary, everyday life, when we experience in our own frames the very feelings that our interlocutor experiences. And empathy is associated with a greater intuitive desire to imitate. (p. 115)