Does Learning A New Language As A Missionary Ever Alter One’s Accent For The Rest Of Their Life?

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I served a foreign mission and had to learn a new language. During the several decades I’ve been back, my native English accent has never once been affected.

If any of you have had the opportunity to listen to Daniel C. Peterson speak, you’ll notice he has a distinct Eastern/Bostonian accent.

Well, starting at the 8:40 minute mark, DCP finally explains the origin of his weird accent. Apparently it started on his mission after DCP learned German so well. Learning “perfect” German altered his English accent for the rest of his life.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cH ... HQAAAAAQAQ

Has anyone ever heard of such a thing happening to a missionary? Call me skeptical. I think the better explanation is that DCP is lying and his accent is completely fake. DCP fakes his accent to sound more intellectual — a sort of cheap imitation of his racist hero, William F. Buckley.

Strange and bizarre but par for the course with DCP.

[drumdude]

Very interesting observation! I would not at all be surprised if DCP, even subconsciously, pulls a "Elizabeth Holmes" move to modify his voice.

It's obvious reading DCP's blog that he writes with a voice that isn't quite his own, rather it seems to be a cobbled together imitation of intellectuals he admires. The only time the real DCP shines through is when he's using his trademark bitter sarcasm and self-deprecation.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

That’s an interesting claim. I learned Spanish having served in Peru, and then later learned enough Portugese-Brazil and Italian to pass proficiency exams while in the Army. I don’t recall my English being impacted at all. I mean. Except the time when I was learning Italian I used to gesture a lot with my hands and scream ‘MAMA MIA’ when startled.

I wonder what it is about the turd bird that makes him lie so much? Perhaps the real effect he feels from his Mormon experience isn’t an affectation, but the baked-in pants-on-fire claims that comes from being a believing Mormon and worst, a paid apologist.

- Doc

[Chap]

Well, starting at the 8:40 minute mark, DCP finally explains the origin of his weird accent. Apparently it started on his mission after DCP learned German so well. Learning “perfect” German altered his English accent for the rest of his life.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cH ... HQAAAAAQAQ

Has anyone ever heard of such a thing happening to a missionary? Call me skeptical. I think the better explanation is that DCP is lying and his accent is completely fake. DCP fakes his accent to sound more intellectual — a sort of cheap imitation of his racist hero, William F. Buckley.

Does DCP's current accent sound unusual to the majority of Americans, I wonder? I am ill-equipped to tell whether it lies within the rather wide range of voices that might be considered normal in the States.

But can learning a new language change one's original accent in English? I have learned to speak a number of languages (not all of them Indo-European) to varying degrees in my time, and I can't say that any of them has ever led to remarks on my changing English accent from family and friends. It all sounds very strange to me.

[Gadianton]

That's a weird but not unexpected claim from him.

...but wouldn't you expect in that case, he'd have a German accent?

Did Hugh Nibley have an accent? I don't think so. There's that famous story about Nibley's German being so perfect that he could impersonate an SS soldier.

[DrStakhanovite]

I have never heard of anyone's accent being changed by virtue of learning another language. How does learning German impact the performance of American English that was acquired as a child? I've heard of people adopting new accents after suffering a brain injury, but not by learning another language as an adult. I could also see an American living in Germany for decades having their accent shift because they have been immersed in the environment for twenty plus years, but how that accent would end up sounding like someone from the Northeastern America is beyond me.

ETA: Listening to the episode and I just don't hear "Bostonian" accent at all.

[Symmachus]

This doesn't happen. One's native accent is determined either by conscious adoption of certain features or by subconscious imitation of the social group that one is most associated with. This is why you will find that children talk like their parents until school and as teenagers sound more like each other than they do like their parents. It's why half the military sound they're like from North Carolina (the other half being from South Carolina).

His tick is a faux Brahmin accent ("rawther" for "rather," "nawt" for "not," and especially "praps" for "perhaps"), which used to be a dialect that I refer to as American Common Academic. He is not the only BYU professor who spoke that way (I can think of one another, in Anthropology, though he had no connection to Mormon apologetics other than contempt for it, so I hesitate to drag his name in here), but it certainly was the kind of accent many people adopted, consciously or not, in spending most of their time around other academics. This is not at all an unusual phenomenon. His academic accent seems strange because he speaks an archaic variety of this dialect, while contemporary ACA is more or less colored by features traditionally thought of as "feminine" and associated with the "Valley Girl" accent that arose the in the late 1970s; it eschews features associated with the Dead White Male Brahmins. He sounds like the careerist academic from the late 1970s that he is (see also, Frasier Crane).

What is hilarious is that he claims to have lost his "R" due to his perfect Standard German. Standard German that you learn in schools or colleges in the US and Britain does drop its uvular "R" in certain positions (mostly at the codas of words and syllables), which British English does in its south eastern quadrant and certain dialects of American English do in the northeast and (formerly but no more) in the Deep South.

How he picked that up from Swiss German is a mystery, though. The "R" of Swiss German which he would have been immersed in for two years uses a trilled "R", not the uvular "R," and it doesn't have the R-drop feature (unlikely in the 1970s anyway). Even the "Standard German" in the media and educational settings there use a trilled "R." The uvular "R" of Standard German has been spreading in Switzerland, but only really since the late 1980s, which would have been after his time there. In short, he wasn't in the right German speaking country at the right time to pick up that still rather restricted feature. He should be going around trilling all of his "Rs" or dropping them at syllabic codas in fast speech.

Funniest of all to me: perhaps it was an effort to humor his host when he accepted that his accent has some vague "East Coast" quality to it, but he doesn't even drop his "R" in his speech!

One wonders why, with a Standard German so perfect that he would have been mistaken for an actual German, he says that Swiss people in the 1970s thought this young man to have been a former Nazi, presumably born in the 1920s or 1930s, rather than just an ordinary young German (see 9:30). I am tempted to suspect that his off-the-cuff attempt to impress the host is being influenced by the apocryphal story about Hugh Nibley, mentioned by Gadianton.

That story itself is utter BS, of course. Hugh Nibley dropped plenty of German in his lectures, always spoken with an accent as atrocious as any tourist from Utah trying to buy "Fawrkarden" at the "Bawnhawf." His Arabic accent was also terrible, and on an old message board his son-in-law Boyd, who has a graduate degree in French, wrote that, while Nibley's understanding of French was probably better than his own, his pronunciation of French was abominably bad. He used to read scholarly articles, so why would it be otherwise? It therefore seems very unlikely to me that Hugh Nibley ever impersonated a German-speaker during the Second World War.

[huckelberry]

Well I am glad Symmachus has cleared this up and with a bit of humor no less. It sounds like Peterson is not completely self aware about his accent. I did not listen to the whole link but did enough to find myself thinking he sounded a bit younger than he looks. There might be something wrong about that but I am not the one with any desire to analyze it.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Well, this could only be more delicious had he affected the mid-Atlantic accent, and decided to deliver his speaking engagements like he were a Hollywood personality from the 40’s.

- Doc

[Dr Exiled]

I have a hard time believing anything this guy says about himself. I don't think he has the ability at self-reflection. I don't think he knows how to be honest with all of the plagiarizing his does and nonsense he continually pushes. I'm sure he has the pompous, stick up your ass accent if there is one.

I have listened to many missionaries come back and have an accent. But they lose it within weeks or months.