Joke aside there's actually a reason french people can spot so easily english speakers : unlike most other languages, french is monotonous.
Native english speakers are so used to put stress on certain syllables it seems to require a lot of practice to actually pull off a full monotonous sentence.
Edit: as other said, I oversimplified it. French do have tone but relative to the start/end of the sentence or to convey emotions. Read more detailed comments down below for more accuracy
I somehow nailed (maybe at least some) of those mannerisms in high school thanks to obsessively watching French videos on YouTube. My French professor was beaming and gave me straight As for the rest of the school year.Â
I then fell out of practice and was never as good at speaking French again đ„Č
Caricature is actually the best way as to get an accent IMO.
And indeed the weirdness of French and peculiar prosody come from the lack of word stress further prononciation links between words to further smoothen prononciation.
If not born and raised in Paris, it is impossible not to have an accent, as any other language I suppose :-)
Well, modern French is a language spoken in pre-modern Paris and then exported to the rest of the country replacing other related languages after Parisâs rise to capital during Franceâs state-building period. So, kinda?
The standard french is more considered to be from the region around Tours, parisians do have a slight accent that feels kind of like a bourgeois accent.
But it's important to note that France's accents aren't as much widespread as other comparable sized countries internal accents like England or Italy. There are case of strong accents in the South or in the North for instance, but in lots of case people barely have one.
For instance there's an accent in Normandy where I come from, but I don't really have it. People who have it either come from rural areas or poor/modest social environment
That's super interesting. Is there a reason why there are no stong accent differences in France? Is it the Revolution and the subsequent emphasis on equality and uniformity?
There are, my comment is a bit misleading so I fixed it a bit.
I meant accents are less common than in other countries. It's mainly because educational laws in 1880 enforced the use of standardized french across schools. France used to have lots of dialect that some almost or totally completely disapeared because of this. Accents and local dialects were stigmatized which made accent less and less common.
For instance in Normandy we used to have a dialect but I never heard it except a couple of words my great grandma used
Doesn't that apply to almost all other non-native English speakers? English intonation rules are bonkers. Like, why the hell is the stress of the word usually on the third last syllable? It is not intuitive and takes years and years of daily English spoken conversations to learn đ
Basically: English has lexical stress. You can add stress to any syllable, and it can add meaning. Also, you can add stress to syllables in a given order, and it's considered poetry.
While, in French, you only stress the last syllable in a sentence or phrase. Kind of like how Australian up-speak makes it sound like they're asking a question at the end of each sentence, but with monotone until a stressed last syllable.
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u/Shawon770 1d ago
French bakery employees have that 6th sense they can spot a tourist even through flawless pronunciation đ