The accent thing is just as fucked as everything else in this case. Some people have said he had no accent at all and some friends claimed he has a slight accent. Who knows the truth? In the niece video he seems to have a slight accent.
See, I thought I detected a very slight accent in the niece video, too. *shrugs*
I find the observations about his accent interesting, though probably not substantive. I can’t help but believe that, considering the severity of his injuries, they must have had some impact on his speech. His injuries probably slowed it down, made it more labored, and if he really did have a trace of an accent before, the injuries may have amplified it.
In another ask I received last night, a native Russian speaker said that in the phone call with his mom, he sounded fine, but he didn’t speak Russian as fast as he thinks (he had once tweeted about that). Again, I can’t help but think that his injuries may have slowed him down, especially the tongue injuries.
But…this got me thinking. Different languages require different sets of sounds. In many languages, the majority of sounds tend to be formed or expressed in certain parts of the mouth and relying more on certain parts of the tongue. Depending on where his tongue injury was, this could have a big effect on how his expressed speech would sound depending on the language he was speaking, and he might be able to pronounce one language better than he could another.
For example, Russian has more frontal consonants than English, according to my resident linguist (aka my husband). When I asked him about this just now, he spewed a bunch of specialized linguistics vocabulary that I don’t know so I won’t even try to sound like I know what he was talking about, but in a nutshell, he agreed with me.
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