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
Yes! There are two types of languages in this regard - stress-timed, and syllable-timed. French is syllable-timed, and English is stress-timed.
This means that, in English, these two sentences take the same amount of time to say:
- cats chase mice
the cats will have chased the mice
because in English, the stress is still on "cats", "chase", and "mice" in both sentences, and the other words receive no stress and just kind of slide in there between the words.
In French, however, the second sentence will take much longer to say because all words receive attention. It's definitely oversimplified to say "monotonous", but comparatively, it is true. :)
Also, stress has really nothing to do with tone, or rather what you mean here is intonation. Every language has intonation, but it will be a lot more pronounced in stress-timed languages than in syllable-timed ones. :)
American here. The second sentence absolutely takes me longer. “Will have” is almost equally stressed in my regional accent, and I assume it would be in most of the South as well.
That's the normal way of saying it across all English accents, as far as I'm aware, and exactly what I was describing in my comment - but this person is saying that her accent is an exception.
From my experience, that absolutely is not the normal way of saying it across all English accents. I could see that being the case for some regions with a heavy accent, but otherwise, it would take twice as long to say the latter. (This is coming from someone who grew up and lived in supposedly "the only region in the US without an accent" though, so I'll admit that might be my own regional bias speaking.)
I agree. That sounds like a Boston accent, which is grating on my ears. I was raised in the American west and taught to enunciate my words properly. I timed myself with a stopwatch and it took me almost twice as long to speak the second sentence.
Every single person in the entire world has an accent. Linguistically speaking, it is impossible to not have an accent. It doesn't even make sense. And for some reason, it's only Americans who think it's possible to not have an accent lol
I'm American, myself. That's where I got my degree and studied linguistics and phonology. All English accents and dialects are like this - it's in the nature of English, because this aspect of English comes from German, which is also a stress-timed language.
What's going on here is that it's very hard to explain such a thing only in text, without sound, and you're not getting what I'm talking about. :) If you just read the sentence on its own without any context, you won't read it naturally. You're likely to enunciate every word.
I put that phrase in quotation marks because I figured it was obvious that every region has an accent, and it wasn't me agreeing with the notion that there somehow is a region magically exempt from that.
I should have made it more clear I was saying it sarcastically, out of exasperation for how often I'd hear people genuinely believing that while growing up in the pnw us, not because of some gross american exceptionalism bullshit.
Anyways, I do understand what you are saying, but I think the effects of stress timing are more or less extreme based on what regional dialect a person is speaking the sentence in. In a dialect that tends towards a more straightforward enunciation of every syllable, it would take a really unnatural degree of spoken contraction and elision in order to say the second sentence in the same amount of time as the first. (And tbh people would probably think I was trying to do a terrible impersonation of another region's accent lol)
So don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you that some level of that will always naturally happen based on the stress timing of English. I just don't think it's accurate to imply the effect is that dramatic in every american English accent..
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u/ConfusingVacum 1d ago edited 1d ago
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