Scandinavians' accent

It seems to me that the Scandinavians (esp. Swedes), besides the Dutch acquire the most natural-sounding accent to other non-native speakers ears. What do you say?

Yesus Hrist, now yust a minute, are we already in Yanuary?

I'm not sure I agree with you. My brother-in-law is a Swede, but he left the country at a young age, so has no accent in English. Many among his family speak English, but all with varying degrees of accent. On what basis would you make such a supposition?

>It seems to me that the Scandinavians (esp. Swedes), besides the
>Dutch acquire the most natural-sounding accent to other non-native
>speakers ears. What do you say?

I would have to agree with this with regards to the Scandinavians. The majority of those whom I had a chance to talk to / listen to had a very minimal "foreign" accent. I suppose the reason for it is the similarity of English and the Scandinavian languages (all having common roots).

I can't comment on the Dutch because I don't recall too many encounters with them, however, I've read/heard that the Dutch seem to be one of the most talented when it comes to learning languages and majority of them can easily communicate in 3-4 of them (Dutch, English, German and French). I guess the similarity in the origin of the languages as well as the country's location plays a big role here.

Now, how about the most unnatural / hard to understand?

My nomination: Indians/Pakistani, Far East Asians.

I guess that we can identify two main factors contributing to Scandinavians having a relatively weak foreign accent in English.

The first one is, as somebody has mentioned before, a certain similarity concerning the phonetics in English and Scandinavian languages. Namely the differentiation in the vowel length, which we don't have in the POlish language, the vowel quality (as Scandinavian sounds are more similar to the English ones than to their POliosh counterparts) and the fact that there's no devoicing of voiced consonants, which occurs in POlish, and which is subconsciously transferred to foreign languages.

The second reason why Scandinavian aquire an American accent (mostly) is the omnipresence of American cultural products such as songs and movies in all media, without any dubbing or voiceover, and this can be observed in Holland as well. Therefore, form early on both Scandinavians and the Dutch are exposed to the (American) English language, which enables them not only to learn it easily but aquire a decent accent as well.

Regards,
KOciamama.

Kociamama - impressive disseration. Nothing to add, is there? :)

There may be lots more to it than that. A Swedish person, let's say, may have less of an accent than another nationality, in English. However, a Swede may have a huge accent in say, Arabic. For interesting information, I refer readers to www.wkipedia.org: Linguistic typology. Languages are classified by these types:

Analytic language
Synthetic language
Fusional language
Agglutinative language
Polysynthetic language

I would suggest that people might have less of an accent in languages belonging to the same class, as oppposed to other classes.

>I would suggest that people might have less of an accent in languages
>belonging to the same class, as oppposed to other classes

Uhm, English and Chinese are both positional languages. Well?

I'm really not qualified to comment - I haven't dug into the subject deeply enough...

I'd say it's lexical affinity rather than typological closeness that makes a foreign tongue more accessible to a speaker of one language.

I understand that a lexical affinity is a combination of terms--words or phrases--occurring within a predefined distance of one another in a text. This is a concept related more to IT (say, Data Mining) and query algorithms, than linguistics, no? Would not fluency in a language other than your native tongue rely more on an understanding of the grammatical structure?

I meant a close relationship between the lexical stocks of two languages. I didn't know that "lexical affinity" is also a term in text processing. In other words, the more words two languages share, the easier it is for the speakers of one of them to learn the other. Grammar also plays a role, which is when your typology of languages comes in handy.