The older you get, the harder it becomes to learn the sounds that are part of a different language. By the time you're a year old, you've learned to ignore most distinctions among sounds that don't matter in your own language. In infancy, a child begins to learn what sounds are important in his or her language, and to disregard the rest. We are born capable of both producing and perceiving all of the sounds of all human languages. People have trouble with sounds that don't exist in the language (or languages) that they first learned as a young child. In reality, everybody has an accent - in somebody else's opinion! Why do foreign speakers have trouble pronouncing certain sounds? You notice it because it's different from the way you speak. You may notice that someone has a Texas accent - for example, particularly if you're not from Texas yourself. People who live in close contact grow to share a way of speaking, or accent, which will differ from the way other groups in other places speak. This is determined by where they live and what social groups they belong to. The other kind of accent is simply the way a group of people speak their native language. This sounds wrong, or 'foreign', to native speakers of the language. For example, if a person has trouble pronouncing some of the sounds of a second language they're learning, they may substitute similar sounds that occur in their first language. One is a 'foreign' accent this occurs when a person speaks one language using some of the rules or sounds of another one. There are two different kinds of accents. What is an accent?īroadly stated, your accent is the way you sound when you speak.