The accent you can't escape: Why your mother tongue shapes every language you speak

Jean-Christophe Mbang switches between French and Bassa with ease, but there's a tell. When he speaks French, the Cameroonian often says "lé" instead of "le" – a small slip that reveals the invisible architecture of his mother tongue.

In Bassa, the sound "e" corresponds to "é", and this phonetic reality follows him across languages, creating what might sound like a grammatical mistake but is actually evidence of something far more fundamental about how we learn to speak.

Maryam faces a different challenge. The Algerian woman can navigate Arabic's complex consonants with fluency, but French names like Pierre or Patrick trip her up. Arabic has no "p" sound. The letter doesn't exist. No sound, no letter, which means there is no easy way to pronounce words built around it.

These aren't errors or deficiencies. They are demonstrations of a linguistic reality: that every language shapes the mouth differently, and those early patterns persist throughout life, no matter how many languages we learn later.

"Phonetically, each language has unique sounds that accentuate what the speaker is trying to convey," Gabonese linguist Régis Ollo Nguema tells TRT Afrika. "This is what gives a language distinctiveness."

A language, he explains, is constructed from its repertoire of sounds, which linguists call an articulatory basis. This foundation, established in childhood, determines not just what we can say easily, but what remains difficult forever to pronounce.

Sound substitutions

Consider Wolof, a language spoken widely in Senegal. When Moustapha, who lives in Senegal's Thiès, refers to a car, he says "wetir". In French, he would say "voiture".

The word "civilisé" becomes "silwissé". "Lavabo" is "lawabo". This isn't approximation or error. Wolof doesn't have the sounds "v" or "c", so it adapts French borrowings to fit its own phonetic system, changing both pronunciation and spelling.

Turkish demonstrates the same principle through absence. Its 29-letter alphabet excludes "w", "x" and "q". A Turkish speaker with no knowledge of English or French might struggle with the name "Malcolm X", potentially omitting the final letter entirely. Someone multilingual, by contrast, would draw on sounds learnt from other languages to bridge the gap.

The phenomenon surfaces strikingly in sports commentary, where non-African broadcasters often stumble over names from the continent. "Compared to French people or other nationalities, I can pronounce the name (Kylian) Mbappé in the correct way from an African perspective," says Nguema. "I can say Mbaye, or even Ndutumu. A native French speaker would say M'bappé, M'Mbaye or N'dutumu."

The difference lies in pre-nasalised sounds that precede oral ones. French speakers can pronounce "mb" in "tombe" without difficulty, but struggle to produce the same combination at the start of a word. They haven't learnt that particular articulation in childhood.

Permanent patterns

Consistent study and practice enable people to learn and even master multiple languages, but phonetics experts agree that some sounds simply cannot be integrated into an adult's articulatory repertoire. Others can be approximated, although they will always carry an accent that hints at one's origins.

"As a Gabonese, for example, I cannot master the range of clicks found in South African languages," Nguema tells TRT Afrika. "My articulatory base is built on two languages, Fang and French. I can pronounce French sounds more or less correctly, but my Fang sounds are much more authentic."

With an estimated 7,000 languages catalogued worldwide, an individual's articulatory range is bound to be limited. Even Ziad Youssef Fazah, the Lebanese hyperpolyglot credited with speaking 58 languages, would struggle beyond his repertoire.

After years of study, what counts as "correct" pronunciation remains relative, shaped indelibly by the first sounds we learn to make.