This was a big confidence booster for me as when I first started learning English, people would complement me on how well I spoke English, but I took that as my accent was still detectable. It's only been in the past 5 years that people assumed I was American and made no comment on my English at all, until I disclosed that English was my second language. It's usually certain words that give me trouble, like "cupboard" or "chef". The AI detected my accent as a mixture of German and English. When I tried to exaggerate my accent, it correctly detected Thai.
If you learned English after 16. You probably still have an accent. Native speakers are really, really, really good at detecting it. They probably know as soon as you say "Hi".
If you tune up your detector that high it’s very likely you’ll get false positives. I’ve met Americans with fairly strong “accents” that aren’t necessarily a dialect either, just a different way of speaking. It could also be a mix with parents who are non-native. American English is vast, and very heterogeneous.
If we’re talking about specific parts like a regional dialect then I would agree, those are tricky to acquire later, at least to those undetectable levels. They can be extremely specific.
Yep big difference in accents of my cousins who moved here when they were 9 and another when they were 18. Now they are in their mid forties and you can still tell who moved when based on their accent. Its impossible to change your accent after late teens.
there are people who are better than other people at blending in their accents, even in more difficult languages than English (for accent coding), perhaps they are just very good at that.
those words are your Shibboleths, words that give your origin away.
When I was in Germany, friendly people used to compliment me on my language skill saying "your German is good!". To which I would reciprocate: "thanks, yours too!"
My ex-wife whose native language is Spanish worked hard to eliminate her accent because she got tired of people calling her accent “cute.” Her shibboleths were anything with a schwa. The whole concept of schwas offends her sense of vocalic purity.
