Portuguese accents

RightHoJeeves

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So I've got a pretty weird question. Essentially one of my characters is an English spy who is trying to sound as though she is actually Portuguese. The idea is that her back story is she was raised in London by a Portuguese au pair. What she's really trying to do is make another character think her backstory is BS, and that she is actually straight Portuguese. She is in fact totally English, but she is faking the accent of a very good English-speaking Portuguese person, if that makes sense.

What I want is for my main character, when he meets her, to clock her accent as being authentic because he understands the language.

I know I can Google what fluent English sounds like when spoken by a native Portuguese speaker, but I don't know how to actually describe it in linguistic jargon (you hear people say things like "hard G", "soft O", etc).

Can anyone advise? Below is a link to a (pretty funny) video of the Portuguese President speaking to a journalist in English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKMHx7Lzs6o


Thanks!
 

neandermagnon

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So I've got a pretty weird question. Essentially one of my characters is an English spy who is trying to sound as though she is actually Portuguese. The idea is that her back story is she was raised in London by a Portuguese au pair. What she's really trying to do is make another character think her backstory is BS, and that she is actually straight Portuguese. She is in fact totally English, but she is faking the accent of a very good English-speaking Portuguese person, if that makes sense.

My friend/work colleague is Portuguese. I can ask her on Monday if you want.

However, someone who is raised in London by a Portuguese Au Pair would not pick up a Portuguese accent. They may become good at imitating the accent, but that's all. If you're raised in London you'll get a London accent. Which one you get would depend on what part of London you live in and your social class (though even some middle and even some upper class people are getting Estuary accents these days).

I think it would be much more plausible if the character just speaks with a London accent, says her parents are Portuguese and that she's lived in London since she was a small child, therefore doesn't speak with a Portuguese accent (and doesn't need to explain this, she can just say she's Portuguese and people wouldn't question it). If she has a Portuguese name and is well versed in Portuguese culture, then she'd be able to pull this off to non-Portuguese people. I know lots of EU immigrants and they speak with foreign-sounding accents, but if they have kids, their kids don't. (And that's not just true about EU immigrants - it's true about all immigrants. People who learn second etc languages as adults or in later childhood have accents. People who learn second etc languages as young children speak like natives. The cut-off age is usually quoted as 6, however it depends on the child.)

Also, I wouldn't recognise someone's accent as specifically Portuguese. When my Portuguese friend started working at our company, I assumed she was Eastern European, because most of the EU migrants are from Eastern Europe - usually Polish (but not always and I never straight up assume someone's from any particular country without asking). Her accent is slightly different to the accents of my Polish colleagues... but I wouldn't say there's any reliable Polish accent either. I have several Polish friends/colleagues and they all sound different from each other.

London is very very very very ethnically diverse. People aren't going to turn around and say they don't believe that someone is from whatever country they say they're from. You can have a 100% English accent and be 100% culturally English and then tell me you're Portuguese, and I'm not going to bat an eyelid. I'll just assume that your parents are Portuguese and you were raised in England from a young enough age that you've got a 100% native accent. I'd expect you to have a Portuguese last name (first name is fine as your parents may have given you an English name to help you blend in or because they love English culture or whatever, plus there's cross-cultural stuff between European countries anyway) and know about Portuguese culture (especially food). I don't have much in terms of frame of reference to know whether what you tell me about Portuguese culture is correct or not (and for that matter, nothing to know if my Portuguese friend is really Polish and just pretending to be Portuguese.)

Passing yourself off as Portuguese to a Portuguese person... that's going to be a lot more tricky. Not having native proficiency in Portuguese is most likely to be the biggest barrier. All of my immigrant friends will talk to each other in their own languages, except when people who don't speak it are part of the conversation (out of politeness). Similarly, I lived in the Middle East for seven years, with very little contact with other British people (my ex partner's a Muslim so we didn't just live in one of those expat compounds) so the first thing I'd do upon meeting another Brit would be 1. speak in English 2. talk about British things. And there's no way in hell I'd recognise someone as being a fellow Brit by how they mispronounce Arabic. You don't hear these things in your second language - if you could hear them, then you'd improve your own accent to sound more native. After age approx 6, you lose a chunk of ability to hear and pronounce sounds that aren't in your language. Accents come from the loss of this ability. (The ability isn't 100% lost and you can coach someone to say sounds differently, for example in Arabic there's two kinds of S, two kinds of T and two kinds of a few letters - to me it's always "two kinds of S" but to an Arab it's clearly "seen" and "saad" and they're as different as S and Z are to me. I can pronounce both seen and saad correctly in Arabic, but I will forever hear both of them as S. I can hear a difference when someone says the sounds in isolation, but when someone's talking at normal speed, I just hear S.)

Here's where the Portuguese Au Pair may come in handy, but only if the Au Pair spoke only Portuguese to the MC as a small child, often enough and for long enough for her to learn to speak Portuguese like a native. It's plausible her parents could have requested that of the Au Pair, as there is a lot of research showing that learning a second language in early childhood gives you a lot of advantages in language learning and other cognitive skills throughout life. If her parents are middle-middle class or upper-middle class, it's plausible they would jump on such an opportunity as this is the sort of thing posh parents are totally into. Mandarin lessons for very small posh children are a thing because of this. I don't know how far most parents take this though. Most posh people aren't fluent in Mandarin. (I'm not posh so I'm only seeing this from a distance.)

Apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick from your scenario, but these are all the things that set of my plausibility radar when reading your question.

And I can still ask my Portuguese friend on Monday if you want. She does sarcasm like a Londoner* though, so watch out for her answer :greenie

*no idea if this is her individual personality, Portuguese culture or due to being good at picking up English culture
 

Bacchus

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Point of order - a child is very unlikely to be "raised" by an au-pair. They get to know them, but the au-pair's duties are things like supervising play, light meals, maybe helping with a bit of ironing etc, and they are unlikely to be around for more than a couple of years max.

Also au-pairs are far more likely to come from Eastern Europe for the last twenty years or more; the au-pair scheme was/is a way to circumvent the need for the right to work whilst learning English.

I'm afraid I can't really help with the question though - my brother and my sister-in-law both speak Portugese but she is from Brazil and he learned the language there - it would be like me passing myself off as coming from, say, Perth because I speak English...
 

RightHoJeeves

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My friend/work colleague is Portuguese. I can ask her on Monday if you want.

That would be hugely helpful, thank you.

However, someone who is raised in London by a Portuguese Au Pair would not pick up a Portuguese accent. They may become good at imitating the accent, but that's all. If you're raised in London you'll get a London accent. Which one you get would depend on what part of London you live in and your social class (though even some middle and even some upper class people are getting Estuary accents these days).

....

Apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick from your scenario, but these are all the things that set of my plausibility radar when reading your question.

I think I did a poor job of explaining the scenario. The accent is entirely a piece of misdirection for the main character and the reader. Elizabeth's excuse (she's the spy) for having an accent is meant to be bogus. She makes the claim about the au pair knowing full well that the other character (Max) won't believe her (because as you said, it's unlikely she'd pick up an accent from an au pair). Because the excuse is so weak, Max will see through it and come to the conclusion that she's merely a native Portuguese speaker who speaks English very well. Max is being pursued by Portuguese agents, so by appearing to be an amateur Portuguese spy with a weak excuse for why she has an accent, Elizabeth is concealing the fact that she is indeed entirely English and represents a completely different group of people who also in pursuit of Max, unknown to him.

Basically, I agree that the au pair excuse it's dumb. It's meant to be :)

Also au-pairs are far more likely to come from Eastern Europe for the last twenty years or more; the au-pair scheme was/is a way to circumvent the need for the right to work whilst learning English.

Noted. This story is set in an alternate history in the 1950s.
 

Tsu Dho Nimh

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As long as Max is not a native Portuguese speaker, and not good with distinguishing the various regional accents in it she can pull it off.

A native speaker could probably tell she's not a native speaker, because there are so many ways non-native speakers can screw up the language that don't depend on accent.

Spotting accents is tricky ... I worked with a Mexican businessman whose dad had been with the UN during his childhood, and he grew up in NYC, attending public schools. When we were speaking face to face my brain did not pick up the accent on his English, and I would have sworn that he had excellent unaccented "broadcast standard" English. Then I heard him talking on the phone when I was not in the same room and suddenly realized his Brooklyn/Bronx accent was very strong.
 

neandermagnon

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I asked my Portuguese colleage whether she'd be able to tell someone's Portuguese by how they pronounce English, she said she wouldn't be able to tell if they've been in the UK for a couple of years or more. If they've literally only just arrived here, she might be able to tell. I asked her what would give it away, and she said she couldn't explain it. (So presumably if you're looking to include anything that gives it away, a kind of more instinctive "I just know" might work better than trying to explain it.)

Apologies if I misunderstood the question. I'm still not 100% clear what your character's trying to do. She's happy to answer more questions if I got it wrong.
 

RightHoJeeves

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I asked my Portuguese colleage whether she'd be able to tell someone's Portuguese by how they pronounce English, she said she wouldn't be able to tell if they've been in the UK for a couple of years or more. If they've literally only just arrived here, she might be able to tell. I asked her what would give it away, and she said she couldn't explain it. (So presumably if you're looking to include anything that gives it away, a kind of more instinctive "I just know" might work better than trying to explain it.)

Apologies if I misunderstood the question. I'm still not 100% clear what your character's trying to do. She's happy to answer more questions if I got it wrong.

No worries, thanks for asking. I'll search around some more, but I might just go for the instinctive feeling for simplicity. Any specifics would be just an added technical detail, really.
 

Tazlima

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I get what you're trying for (sounds interesting, btw), but you're making things harder than they need to be. The existence of the accent itself, as you've seen, should be enough for Max to call BS on the au pair story, which is, from what I'm gathering, all you need for the purposes of the story.

If you do decide to add the "he's fluent" element, you have three possibilities:

1) His native tongue is English, and he learned Portugese as a second language
2) His native tongue is Portugese, and English is the second language
3) He grew up speaking Portugese and English in equal measure and they can both be considered native tongues for him.


You didn't clarify which applies to Max, and it can make a big difference.

My first language is English, and I gained fluency in Italian as an adult. I can tell you parts of my own experiences that may or may not be useful.

1) I can spot an Italian accent in English fairly easily. Additionally, I can differentiate to some degree between English accented in languages that I don't speak. So, for example, if you played video clips of English accented with Russian, French, German, Arabic, and a few others, I could probably tell you which is which, despite lack of fluency in any of them. However, I'm familiar with the cadences of those languages. If you played clips of other languages, I'd probably be stumped.

On the flip side, I have much more difficulty picking out accents of any type in Italian. Indeed, on several occasions I astonished my Italian friends by understanding things that gave them trouble (period pieces, for example, and some very memorable conversations with a guy from southern Italy who spoke in accented dialect so thick that my Roman friends couldn't parse a word he said. I actually served as his translator, from Italian back into Italian). The reason for this was because to me, it was all part of the same whole. New words, old words, accents from here and there... as I was learning the language, I didn't know which was which. In my mind, it was a monolith, all equally indecipherable at first, and all equally understandable later on.

2) Ability to speak a language and ability to parse an accent are totally different skills. Someone can be good at one, both, or neither.

When you have an accent, as I did in Italy, the first question you'll hear in basically every conversation is "Where are you from?" Well, after a couple years of repeating, "I'm an American, blah, blah, blah," I decided to goof around with it, particularly when I was out drinking with friends and chatted with strangers I knew I'd probably never see again. I started telling people I was from whatever country popped into my head, trying to do someplace different every time. When I began doing this, I was sure people would call BS, but it worked EVERY SINGLE TIME. Despite the fact that I had an obvious American accent (I never could shed it properly), and look like... well, an old woman once told me that I had "the map of Ireland drawn on my face," so that should give you an idea, I easily convinced people that I was from every corner of the globe.

From this, I learned that while most people are excellent at recognizing "not from here," far fewer are able to differentiate between various accents with any degree of accuracy.

3) When two people discover, while speaking one language, that they're both fluent in another language, there's nearly always a brief exchange of pleasantries in that second language, even if they afterward switch back to the first language they were speaking. If you want to make Max fluent in Portugese either as a first or second language, then Elizabeth will also have to actually know the language (to varying degrees depending on Max's level of fluency) to pull off the ruse. Even if this is an exceptional circumstance and he skips this little ritual because he wants to hide his suspicion, it would be a simple matter for him to toss a Portuguese phrase or two into the conversation to see if she understands him.

Just some things to consider as you put your scene together.
 

RightHoJeeves

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I get what you're trying for (sounds interesting, btw), but you're making things harder than they need to be. The existence of the accent itself, as you've seen, should be enough for Max to call BS on the au pair story, which is, from what I'm gathering, all you need for the purposes of the story.

Yeah, to be honest it was only ever going to be a throwaway comment. Like "from the way she hit her Gs, Max knew she was a native speaker", or something. He's a professional guy who knows his stuff, so it was a detail meant to make him sound capable and knowledgeable about the area and language. Kind of like how a foreign diplomat would have a fairly in depth and academic knowledge of a country they're based in. I think I'll just go with the more general accent though.

If you do decide to add the "he's fluent" element, you have three possibilities:

1) His native tongue is English, and he learned Portugese as a second language
2) His native tongue is Portugese, and English is the second language
3) He grew up speaking Portugese and English in equal measure and they can both be considered native tongues for him.

The first option. He's Australian, but has been based in Portugal/Spain for some years.