Why you have an accent in a foreign language

OPEN A TEXTBOOK for a foreign language, and one of the first things you see is an alphabet, enumerating the letters used in the writing system and the sounds they represent. This is obviously crucial for unfamiliar systems, say those of Greek or Russian. But even for languages that rely on the Latin alphabet, the guide will explain how diacritics such as accent marks change a letter’s pronunciation, and quirks such as the -ch- in German or -gl- in Italian. (The first often sounds like the ch in Scottish loch, the second like the -ll- in million.)

And with that, it’s off to master greetings, vocabulary and so on, with little further thought for pronunciation. This is a shame. There is much more to learning a foreign accent than the sounds that the letters on the page represent. To begin with, the rough equivalents given in English are often quite rough indeed. In French, the p in Paris sounds rather different from the p in English, a contrast often neglected in textbooks: the French version lacks the strong puff of air of the English one. (Hold your palm in front of your mouth and say “Paris” in English. Then try making the p without the puff, and you’ll get the French kind.)