I’ve been told by French girls I sound like I’m mocking stuck up Parisians when I speak French.
Apparently my German sounds like I’m french, my english sounds like I’m australian, and my French sounds like I’m a rural farmer.
What kind of rural farmer ? You roll your R’s like Edith Piaf ? I think it’s still done in some parts of Bourgogne.
I speak with a rural Vaudois accent.
I’m pretty sure I change my pitch depending on which language I’m speaking. Scandinavian languages go pretty low, English and German is somewhere in the middle, and in French and Italian I go pretty high out of some desperate hope that it will make me easier to understand. I’m not sure it helps much.
Intonation of course changes, though probably not enough. And I’m pretty sure someone from a village close to home could recognize traces of my accent no matter which language I’m trying to speak.
What about you @Blaze@piefed.social
Thanks for asking! Well, I think my voice changes between languages, I try to get an okayish accent in English, so that’s a bit different. Same for Spanish. I feel like each language has its “register”, so switching from one to the other induces some change.
Not bilingual, but my argentine roommate at the time could not recognize my voice when I spoke french (my native language). I think he thought my voice was lower and my accent flatter than when I spoke spanish.
You can also kinda lose your native accent if you live in another country, or even another region of your own country, for too long.
I’ve been bilingual from an early age and consider English to be my second native language. There’s no difference in tone or intonation and I can slip from one language to the other in the middle of a sentence without missing a beat. But, for some reason, it’s a lot easier for me to be social in English than my actual native language.
