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by kelvinjps10
39 days ago
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But accent and pronunciation are different things, and the fact that you don't have a particular accent doesn't mean that you don't speak the language well, what matter most is pronunciation. Sometimes it can get ridiculous like when Trump had a interpreter for a guy that was native in English but had an accent or that other leader from africa that Trump asked where he learned English when it was it's native language.
Coming back to accent is different than pronunciation, in any English test like IELTS or Cambridge accent won't be qualified |
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This isn't true in the way you are thinking of. An accent can pronounce words the same way that another accent distinguishes. An accent can pronounce word x that another accent pronounces word y. What comes to mind immediately: in Indian English accents, RP/GA fricative "th" is pronounced as the aspirate, while the RP/GA aspirated "t" is pronounced retroflex, so naively, "three" can be misheard as "tree".
The working-class accent that I use where I'm from (not India) is syllable-timed (stress does not lengthen the duration of a syllable), and uses pitch lexical stress, rather than intensity/loudness for it, and stress itself is frequently very differently located compared to RP or GA. For "th" as well, we collapse it into t/d.
All in all, for someone who has heard it for the first time or rarely, it can be extremely disorienting to listen to a very distant foreign accent.