First Observation: The word “accent” is used for two quite different phenomena.
The first is how the average Texan speaks differently from the average Londoner.
Those are different variants of the same language, but each language has its own vowels, its own consonants, its own intonation, etc.
The second is how second-language learners of English will usually be influenced by their native languages to varying degrees. Some slight pronunciation mistakes will be more common, others will almost never occur, but not everyone will make all the mistakes, and everyone is trying to speak the language more like a native speaker.
Second Observation: Dialect coaching is cool.
Unfortunately, professional dialect coaching for amateurs does not seem to be a service that is readily available where I live.
Third Observation:
I have noticed that Americans are often reluctant to use terms like “pronunciation mistake” or “wrong” in connection with foreign accents, and tend to accept foreign accents as “just another way of speaking English”. That’s nice of you guys, and it’s probably vital for an immigrant nation, where immigrants would sooner or later get pissed off at being corrected all the time. But for us foreigners outside English-speaking countries who are trying to learn English, it just doesn’t make any sense. We don’t need you to respect the way we speak English here in Austria, because we really don’t speak English in Austria. We’ll pick either an American or a British pronunciation standard and try to emulate it to the best of our abilities. We’ll all fail in the end, but some of us less than others.
This different way of thinking about foreign accents has an interesting effect on movies: when an American movie is set entirely in a foreign country, all the actors will speak English to each other in a foreign accent. I hear that and I keep thinking: “why do they keep struggling with a foreign language when they are among themselves?” and sometimes “wow, that four-year-old has already studied a foreign language!”. A German or Austrian movie would just use regular, fluent German as a substitute for a language we wouldn’t understand.
So, on to Tibet.
There are many things wrong with Pitt’s imitation of bad Austrian English, but what Herr Singer says is mostly wrong.
First, Patriotic Protest: Heinrich Harrer, Brad Pitt’s character in Seven Years in Tibet, was Austrian. He attended high school and university in my home town. Yet they circle present-day Germany on the map, excluding the area he actually lived in.
Yes, it’s true that German tends to harden (devoice) final consonants. This applies to the northern varieties of the language. The phenomenon is much weaker and for some speakers even nonexistent in Austria. Also, “hard” consonants in Austria are a lot softer than in Germany. Singer claims to know how it’s supposed to sound… and it sounds… well, like a German accent. Northern Germany. Definitely not an Austrian accent.
One thing that’s completely wrong about Pitt’s accent is that it is based on an American accent. In the 20s and 30s, schools in Austria exclusively taught “the King’s English”. So, “glasshouse” should be /ˈɡlɑːshaʊs/, not /ˈɡlæshaʊs/.
But anyway, you can’t treat foreign accents the same as different regional accents among native speakers. Because all language learners try to minimize the influence of their native language, and some will succeed in some respects. So even if a certain mistake is common among native German speakers, it’s ridiculous to criticize an actor for not imitating that mistake enough.
