something that I’ve been wondering about lately as a monolingual person:

I wonder if folks can hear accents in a non-native language. like can they tell that their accent differs from others’ accents? can they tell that two native speakers have different accents?

a long time ago my Finnish friend would help me try to pronounce Finnish words and I was trying my best lol, to the point that I literally couldn’t hear any difference between what I was saying and what he was saying. but I inferred that I definitely still had a strong accent (and it would be really weird if I didn’t!)

so I wonder if that inability to detect accents continues until you get really really experienced with a language, or I wonder if a non-native speaker is ever able to detect accents

@kasdeya I can detect accents in languages I'm familiar with, which includes English despite not being a native speaker. So that'd be a yes to your question! I can't tell in French or Spanish, so I suppose it'd indeed be about knowing what the norm is to recognise an accent or a dialect.

@fargate ooh that’s really cool to know! do you know around what time you started being able to hear accents in English? or I guess what I’m really curious about is how much practice it took to be able to reach that level of familiarity with the language

@kasdeya Uuuuhhh... I don't think I can tell, it was a long while back. For another language it was around three years of study in my teens to be able to notice it in the listening exercises I guess? I haven't really thought about this to that level of detail.

@fargate three years is a lot less than I would have guessed. and that’s totally okay that you don’t know for sure! thanks for answering my questions 💙

@kasdeya Yes definitely! i can reasonably accurately tell the difference between various accents of English or Spanish (my second languages after Dutch), and have a vague idea of the difference between German accents (that is: i guessed several times where someone is from based on accent). i can also usually detect an English accent in Spanish or Dutch.

In my case, i mostly learned Mexican Spanish from the family, which makes everyone in Spain quite confused. Especially because being unable to pronounce the rr, having blonde hair and a bit of autism means i get categorized into the “tourist who has no idea what is being said or going on”, and they respond in extremely broken English instead. Until i speak Catalan to them and they decide to respond in understandable Spanish instead. :P

Also the difference between Catalan and Valencian and Mallorcan was quite obvious even back before i seriously started learning them. i would say they are dialects, not different languages (but that’s a somewhat politically loaded question).

@anya ooh, it is so cool that you can speak three separate languages that well, and it’s interesting that you can distinguish accents in all three. thank you for sharing 💙

@kasdeya there's a concept in music that works well here: training your ears is separate from testing your playing (speech), but they're mutually supporting and needed to train each other

for instance, people untrained in music have a hard time telling when a note is a quarter-step off (a huge error for a musician; meanwhile, a violinist, because of the foundational need to use their ears to guide their fingers every second they play, often has more finely tuned ears than the average musician training output, whether in music or language, helps train your ears, and with training, the longer training is done and the better the person gets, the smaller and smaller deviations their ears will be able to lick up

@OctaviaConAmore oohh, I don’t know much about music and honestly never considered that a musician would need to train their ears too! this is such a cool comparison and makes total sense to me - especially because IIRC there’s a lot of overlap between music and language. animals with more developed communication (like birds with their birdsongs) tend to also appreciate music more