Intonation and Foreign Accents

I came across this video on Reddit the other day (it was posted by the user Arrow2Face).

The narrator is Chinese. He is definitely speaking in Chinese-accented non-American English, but I, being an uninformed American, was unsure whether it's British or Australian English. Some commentators on the comment thread believe it's Australian. So I guess you'd call it Chinese-accented Australian English? Chinese-accented Australian-accented English?

Anyway, I honestly don't think his pronunciation is that bad. He says something like /ɑndə/ or /ɑnə/ for 'and', and he definitely has a kind of stereotypical Chinese accent when it comes to vowels, but I can understand the words he uses if I listen closely. No, his pronunciation isn't what makes this announcer so difficult to understand. It's his intonation. As others in the thread say, it's almost like he's reading blindly from a phonetic script. His intonation is all over the place, muddling up my native perception of word boundaries. The intonation is what makes this narration so strange. It doesn't even sound like your catch-all Chinese accent anymore. Some of my favorite comments are

"Some times he nails it. Other times he's just a wee bit off. This guy is like the uncanny valley of voiceovers. "

 and

" its like scandinavian cockney"

 and the following thread, which you can click to see more clearly

What made me so interested in the affect of intonation in this video is that I'm currently working on my Japanese intonation while reading aloud. Let me tell you, pitch accent is difficult work. When in doubt, just stay flat! is my suggestion to you, as suggested to me by Mr. Masamune. How do you pronounce 不潔（ふけつ）ではないです? The accent is on the で, so it's something like fuketsudeha naidesu, not fuketsudeha naidesu, as I pronounced it originally. Although to my ears it sounds like fuketsudeha naidesu, as if the accent is rising to meet the high accent. Or something. Because flat accents aren't really flat? Or... I might have messed it all up again. Damn my native intonation, slipping insidiously into my foreign language just as my hard t's and k's do! For all I know, when I speak in Japanese I'm only a little better than Mr. Knife announcer.

You can use this dictionary to look up the pitch accents of words you don't know or are unsure of. A number next to the entry will tell you which syllable has the high pitch. 0 is flat pitch, and on. (Read the description for this numbering system here in Japanese here, in section 4.) Not all words in the dictionary have pitch information.

HOWEVER -- pitch accent of a word can change based on the pitch accent of surrounding words (so, when you put the words together into a sentence). So the best thing to do is listen and learn. Don't sweat intonation TOO much. Practice it, but don't let it get you speak-shy (that's like pee-shy, except with speaking, I guess). If you care too much about intonation you'll end up saying nothing at all, and what's the point of that?

This site, Shiawase, has some more information and interesting links.  There's also the wikipedia article on Japanese pitch accent.
 

Can You Speak a Foreign Language Perfectly if You Have an Accent?

I saw a post titled "perfect, but accented" at John Wells' Phonetic Blog. In it he wonders about the affect of accent on one's perception of what is 'perfect English'. He says: 

"Writing about yesterday’s proceedings at the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, the Guardian’s reporter Michael White describes the Russian owner of the London Evening Standard and the Independent, Evgeny Lebedev, as ‘speaking perfect, accented English’.

This made me think. Would it be possible to claim that someone spoke perfect, grammatically flawed, English? I don’t think so. Could you describe someone as speaking perfect English with inaccuracies in vocabulary? Again, I don’t think so.

How, then, is it that someone can speak perfect English, but with mistakes in pronunciation?

Why is it that ‘perfection’ tolerates L1 interference in phonetics, but not in grammar or vocabulary?"

The accented English in question (Mr. Lebedev's) can be heard in this video from The Guardian.

First to talk about the broader question: "Why is it that ‘perfection’ tolerates L1 interference in phonetics, but not in grammar or vocabulary?"

I'm not sure what constitutes the idea of 'perfect', but my thought is that it isn't something 'special' about phonetics that allows us to tolerate missteps like foreign accent in our view of perfection but not grammar/vocabulary missteps. I see it as a system of compensation. 

Even a native speaker isn't completely perfect. The other day I was watching a documentary about dyslexia and Erin Brokovich used the word 'disregard' when I'm pretty sure she meant to say 'regard' - technically she said the exact opposite of what she was trying to say, and she's a native speaker. Just the other day I discovered the hiccough is pronounced like hiccup. I am 22 years old and I have always thought that hiccough was pronounced hik-off and that maybe that was how they said hiccup in Britain. I don't think anyone would say that we speak imperfect English, though. 

Maybe it's because our accents are within the realm of 'acceptable native English accents' and because our grammar is pretty spot on. We can afford to misread or misspeak or misunderstand vocabulary once in a while. The overall strength of our phonetic and grammatical aspects or what have you overcome the slip-ups that we make in areas like vocabulary. 

So my theory is that what is judged as 'perfect' or 'native' English is a system of balances between strengths in things like 'lack of L1 interference in L2 phonetics' or 'robust lexicon' or 'comprehensive grammatical knowledge'. You can have a few points taken off one if you can make them up with the other aspects. This extends to things like reading, too. I can read something in Japanese and answer questions well enough despite a less than robust lexicon and a very dire lack of kanji reading ability. This is because my grammar is fairly sound, my ability to recognize the meaning of kanji (don't ask me about 音読み or 訓読み though) and my ability to draw from context is strong. That was actually probably a bad example because I'm definitely nowhere near native reading fluency, but you get the idea.

Returning to the specific accent in question... I'm American so his English is already 'accented' to my ears. On top of that I really only heard the faintest of accents. I would consider his English perfect.

There are some interesting comments by other readers, too, about the perception of certain accents and how that affects your perception of that person's fluency  (a Russian-accented English 'sounds better/more fluent/more intelligent' than a Chinese-accented English, etc).

Accents of the Doctor

A bunch of clips from the "Fires of Pompeii" episode of Doctor Who. The Doctor and Donna go to Ancient Rome and due to the translation prowess of the Tardis, everyone seems to speak in English. The funny thing is that when either Donna or the Doctor says something in Latin, it sounds like Welsh or Celtic to the Romans.

When I hear the various English accents in Doctor Who I can recognize that there are differences, but I have no context for them regionally/geographically. So I read the comments of this post from Language Log about the 10th Doctor's northern accent with some interest. Besides the comment that made mention of the Doctor Who episode above, I found this one, which I thought was funny:

 And this one, which made me repeat 'pen' and 'pin' to myself until I couldn't even tell if I was speaking English any longer:

I'd heard about the pen/pin merger and come across it most in my mother's speech (her family is from the Texas/Arkansas border and thereabouts). For myself the merge of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before the nasal stops ([m], [n], and [ŋ]) doesn't seem to be an established rule. I call my cousin /bɛn/ and I write with a /pɛn/, but I order from a either /mɪnju/ or /mɛnju/ at /wɪndi:z/. It seems like I switch between them. This may be a result of living in very international environment as a child and a pretty diverse area culture/language/accent wise here in south central Texas, or maybe because my father's side of the family has a kind of 'chicano' accent (yes, my grandma pronounces 'chair' kind of like 'Cher').

I don't remember how my friends up in upstate New York pronounced words like 'pen' or 'Wendy's'. The only example of glaringly differing accents I remember is the Reese's episode I had as a freshman. We were in the drama house watching the local improv group and my roommate said, "It smells like Reese's in here!" She pronounced it /ri:si:z/. In the noisy room I misheard her and thought she said, "it smells like feces in here!" I'm sure my reaction puzzled her. (I pronounce it /ri:sɪz/, by the way, like the commercial.)