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 | |  | Kin San Kwok
Born: 2 January 1981
Lives: Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
Time lived in area: More than 10 years
Occupation: Chef/waiter |
The kind of friends you spend time around can have a big impact on your grasp of different languages.
Language of interview: English
Duration: 00:18 (mins/secs)
The participants were asked to describe how they spoke in their own words.
How do you describe your accent: "I think I was OK."
Have there been other influences on the way you speak: "I spent 12 years in UK; before that I was in Hong Kong."
Do you have skills in languages other than English?: Yes
Other languages: Cantonese
When I lef school I can learn anymore up-to-date word with, if, unless I'm wif oder er more English friends, but after I lft and I been hanging around with more Cantonese people, so it's like up-to-date Cantonese, rather than English.
Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes Many speakers who achieve total fluency in terms of vocabulary and grammar and an impressive command of idiom in a second language are seldom able to acquire a native accent, unless they are exposed to the second language early enough in their childhood. Pronouncing a sound or series of sounds is an incredibly complex affair involving deeply automatic processes, requiring minute adjustments of the lips, tongue, jaw, soft palate and vocal cords. This process is acquired up to the age of about twelve and although we continue to adapt our speech as we grow, certain processes become automatic reflexes and it becomes very difficult to change them. Kinsan demonstrates perfectly the accent of a speaker who is fluent in a language other than his mother tongue, but whose accent betrays traces of interference from that first language. He simplifies combinations of consonants that are presumably unnatural within his first language, Cantonese, such as his omission of the final <t> in leftand the in friends, while he substitutes a sound into the middle of the word hanging in the phrase hanging round with more Cantonese people. He also simplifies a number of grammatical constructions, omitting a plural marker in the phrase unless I'm withmore English friendand leaving out the auxiliary verb have in I been hanging round with more Cantonese people. The rhythm of his speech, too, is heavily influenced by Cantonese, a language where the tone of an individual word is crucial to meaning, whereas in English the intonation of a statement as a whole is used to give additional clues to meaning. Nonetheless, his ability to use extremely idiomatic English features, such as the fillers, like and you know, demonstrates his overall fluency.
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