Accents

[yessamaca]

Vicky,

I had meant in any accent...since the topic is just "accents" and doesn't specify which.  I don't know how possible it would be for you to read it in English with a Dutch accent, but it would be really really funny to try.  

Post things in Dutch?  On a Dutch language forum?!  You must be mad, woman!    :lol:

Jess

[Vicky]

Ok, Jess,

I suppose there's enough other topics where we could write in Dutch.

Re accents. Yesterday I was helping my daughter with my mother tongue Kyrgyz (homework) and realized that she lost that "g" sound we have almost similar with Dutch. She sounds as a native Russian speaker. That makes me scared that she will have Russian accent when she will start learning Dutch again.

Today she had hre first English lesson at school. Now I have to help her with two languages.

Groetjes,

Vicky

[yessamaca]

Vicky,

How old is your daughter?  If she is young enough and starts on Dutch again soon then she shouldn't have an accent in either language.  

Jess

[Vicky]

She is 7 now and her Dutch family want her to spend her summer vacation in NL. Once she had done it and returned with a perfect accentless Dutch but it was 2 years ago and she has forgotten the language. She will have to do it all over agtain but this time she will have less time for that. I base my fear for accent on how she speaks Kyrgyz now which was her first language.

Groetjes,

Vicky

[yessamaca]

Do you speak Dutch at all at home?  I guess that would be the only way she could keep what she learns, but I really don't have that much experience.  Just what I learned in school.

[Vicky]

No, unfortunately we don't speak Dutch at home. Here's only me who can speak Dutch to her and since I'm not fluent in it is difficult. Her father speaks (bad) Russian to her when he calls. I shall hope that her vacation there will help her to get Dutch back.

Groetjes,

Vicky

[Dutch_Person]

How varied are Dutch accents (within the Netherlands)?  Is there a more standard accent that a majority of people use?

Also, being a native English speaker from the US, would I be able to master the accent relatively easy?  It seems that foreigners in the US rarely fully master the US neutral accent and always sound, at least to some extent, foreign.  My goal is to one day speak Dutch well enough to fool a Dutchman into thinking I am his compatriot.  Is this a reasonable goal?

Failing that, since few foreigners learn Dutch, how well can Dutch people pick up on where you're from based on your accent?  I spent time in South America and since no one I met had ever heard an American speaking Spanish, they couldn't place where I was from; they just said I sounded "different."  Is Dutch the same way?

The accents are as varied as in any country. For the most part they are mutually intelligible. Only Frisian, Limburgish and some Flemish (Belgium) accents can present problems. There indeed is a standard Dutch pronunciation. People learning Dutch will be taught that standard pronunciation.

I would say that it is improbable, but not impossible to pose as a native. Dutch people who have been living in the USA for a few years will pick up the typical American sound of the r (which in British English is nearly absent). When they speak Dutch to us we can easily tell they've been living there for a while. Now consider the fact that you're native to the USA...

But I must say that I met non-natives (Germans and Scots) speaking Dutch with hardly any accent or no accent at all.

[Quetzal]

How varied are Dutch accents (within the Netherlands)?  Is there a more standard accent that a majority of people use?

Also, being a native English speaker from the US, would I be able to master the accent relatively easy?  It seems that foreigners in the US rarely fully master the US neutral accent and always sound, at least to some extent, foreign.  My goal is to one day speak Dutch well enough to fool a Dutchman into thinking I am his compatriot.  Is this a reasonable goal?

Failing that, since few foreigners learn Dutch, how well can Dutch people pick up on where you're from based on your accent?  I spent time in South America and since no one I met had ever heard an American speaking Spanish, they couldn't place where I was from; they just said I sounded "different."  Is Dutch the same way?

The accents are as varied as in any country. For the most part they are mutually intelligible. Only Frisian, Limburgish and some Flemish (Belgium) accents can present problems. There indeed is a standard Dutch pronunciation. People learning Dutch will be taught that standard pronunciation.

I would say that it is improbable, but not impossible to pose as a native. Dutch people who have been living in the USA for a few years will pick up the typical American sound of the r (which in British English is nearly absent). When they speak Dutch to us we can easily tell they've been living there for a while. Now consider the fact that you're native to the USA...

But I must say that I met non-natives (Germans and Scots) speaking Dutch with hardly any accent or no accent at all.

Seconded. I know two non-native speakers who speak with not even a hint of an accent (even though both still occasionally get a gender wrong), one is Scottish or Irish and the other is a Francophone Belgian - both have spoken Dutch in their everyday life for probably like twenty years or more, though. Losing an accent takes a long time.