I have a terrible accent. In French, that is. And it's small comfort to know that unless I had learned the language before my sixth birthday, I will always have an English-as-first-language speaker's accent. I can work on it, but francophones are always going to know which side of the Ottawa line I'm from. Who cares?
Some of us may think an accented speech means something. If a person speaks English with an accent, it may be interpreted as one or all of a number of things beyond the obvious that they learned English at some time after the age of six.
They are new to Canada. They lack the time spent here to acquire a Canadian speech sound.
That suggests a lack of acculturation. They haven’t really become one of “us” no matter how long they have lived here.
They lack attachment. They haven’t yet separated themselves from the language of their birth country.
A lack of formal education could be the cause. More school time would have helped them overcome their accent.
That means a lack of effort or time spent in consciously trying to lose the accent. If they had studied longer and harder, they could have achieved the goal.
They lack sophistication. They are from a working class family (whatever that still means) with no aspirations to improve their social standing.
All of these factors imply two other criticisms as well as a glaring prejudice about class distinctions. The first is that something—effort, intention, education, ambition, time—must be lacking. People with an accent are deficient in one or more of these ways. We may assign them the status of quaint or cute or interesting, but overall, they lack.
Rather than a deficiency, however, that accented speech indicates second-language proficiency. They don't lack something in the language department; English is simply their second (or third or more) language.
Second, is the belief that their accent is something negative which must be overcome in some struggle. It will require a force of will and intention and practice in order to subjugate their peculiarities of speech pronunciation. Their accent appears to us as an enemy that must be defeated. Until we go travelling, that is.
It takes only a moment of struggling with vaguely-remembered verb conjugations or guide-book phrases in an effort to negotiate a fair price for a taxi ride or the correct destination for said taxi for most of those judgements to be gone forever, and that can happen without even leaving the country. We are a bilingual nation and yet few of us can travel with complete linguistic freedom in the francophone regions of our land.
Now, consider the multi-ethnic nations of Europe. The Swiss must be conversant with four languages at least—five if they venture into Romanish neighbourhoods—and the Dutch of course have long held the distinction of speaking better English than most of those born within sound of The Bells. Shaw had it right when his polyglot professor in Pygmalion said of Eliza that she must be a Hungarian Princess because she spoke English better than the English.
Even small kingdoms in the EU treat English as a second language and a tourist can venture there without difficulty. Good manners also erases barriers. In a foreign language environment, if we speak some words of social grease—the basic “please, thank you, hello, goodbye”—we often find we have shifted a transaction from merely commercial to one of interest and relationship. A young server at a restaurant in Lucerne embodied it all.
We discovered that she was working in Switzerland to improve her language skills. She had been born in Romania, but Bulgaria was next door and so she, along with most children, acquired that language while growing up. And Russian. Well, Mom was from there and besides, everyone needed Russian because that was the giant next door. She had come to work in Switzerland to improve her ability in German and French, but found so many customers defaulting to English, which she had been introduced to in school, that it was now becoming her main speaking language, besides Sweitzerdeutsch, which I don't know how to speak any better than I know how to spell it. Six language competencies she had. No, she wasn't going to be writing literary scholarship in any of them, but she could make customers feel at home in their native tongue and that counted for a lot, as it did with us.
People don’t care that we have an accent. They probably hear nothing but accented speech from other Euro-neighbours who may be travelling in their land. They know that they too have an accent that marks them to those same neighbours as speakers of their own mother tongue. And Europe has relatively few language accents to accommodate, especially in comparison to the linguistically rich lands to the south and east of that continent.
You probably have heard some variation of this urban legend or its international version. A French speaker from Canada is visiting France and everywhere he goes people laugh at his pronunciation of their language. They claim he is speaking some quaint, old-fashioned version of French that went out of use centuries ago. A few things mark it as myth.
How would you know what your language sounded like centuries ago? If you have an interest or even the academic background in geographical-historical linguistics, you may know of some of the shifts in language vocabulary and pronunciation that have taken place. Hopefully, you will also have acquired some good manners along the way so that even if you are hearing your language in a slightly different form, you will not be so rude as to laugh at the speaker.
Getting back to the myth, I decided to ask a bilingual Frenchman about the Canadian French story because I'd heard it so many times from people whose dubious claim for its authenticity was that it had happened to a friend of a friend of theirs. He was born and spent much of his childhood in France before moving to England with his parents. He ended up in Victoria. He hadn't heard the story of the archaic language of the French-Canadian and he snorted when he did.
"Really? Can you imagine a storekeeper insulting a shopper by ridiculing his accent? And, do you know how many accents are heard on the streets of any city in Europe on any given day?" So what if someone uses "le fin de semaine" instead of "le weekend"; don't get uppity or you won't be invited to the "pique-nique".
Our own Quebecois also have definite opinions on judging speakers by accent if my friend who was born in la belle province is to be believed, and why not because he actually has the experience first hand. He says, Lac St. Jean "habitants" are difficult to understand in Montreal, and "Quebec City has some of the best French speakers in the province". C'est la vie. C'est la guerre. C'est Canada.
He reminded me of our own experience with accented language in English-speaking Canada. Well, it was a small town outside of Twillingate, Newfoundland that was supposed to be English-speaking. We had stopped for tea (and toast with bakeapple jam which the proprietor had made and insisted we "just have to try some"). Beverly was listening in to a conversation of three lads in working clothes seated at another table. I haven't had the desire for such eavesdropping since my ears declined to engage in the activity, and so I contented myself with stealing bits of her toast when she wasn't looking. Later in the car she commented, "I know they were speaking English, but I haven't the foggiest %##$&# idea what they were saying."
This judging by accent thing is probably just a North American issue. The question of accents in language isn't one that troubles most Europeans. Oh, the Brits may say they can tell the birthplace and school of a fellow Englishman within a few sentences, but some version of that could likely be said for conversations of native speakers of any language. We in Canada (and the States, I gather) think it means something good or bad when a person speaks accented English, and we feel compelled to ask them, "Where ya from?" as if their answer will determine our feelings towards them.
I like to think of historical precedents for this practice, such as:
Nuu-chah-nulth chief Maquinna to Captain Cook: "Where you from Pink-skinned Person, and don't those clothes itch something awful?"
Beothuk to Viking: "Where you from Hairy Face, and did you get left out in the sun too long or was your hair always that colour?"
Montagnais Begourat to Champlain: "Where you from Floppy Hat? Here, I'll trade you some balsam tea to keep the scurvy away if you'll come shoot some Iroquois for me."
Well, as the saying goes in any language, you probably had to be there to appreciate the old-fashioned accent on origins.