I recently read an article about Joel Embiid, a basketball star for the 76ers and also part of the U.S. Olympic team this year. Embiid moved to the U.S. when he was 15 from Cameroon. He’s a polyglot, speaking Basaa, French, English, and Spanish. When he first came to the U.S. he did not speak much English.
I listened to some of his sports interviews in French. One would expect him to be fluent coming from the part of Cameroon he is from, and he is fluent, but his accent sounds odd to my non-native speaker ear. It sounds like an American accent. I found another Cameroon speaker on YouTube and that sounded more like what I expected with the alveolar trill. I know people get rusty with languages when they stop using them but I wouldn’t expect their accent to change?
I am just curious about this. Is there a native French speaker who would listen to a short clip of Embiid on YouTube and share your impression of his accent?
It’s possible he doesn’t get to speak French much.
When my English brother came back to England after decades living in Sweden, he spoke English with an amusing Swedish accent. After a few weeks his original very strong rural Devon accent had returned, which was equally amusing. He then got very frustrated when speaking Swedish on the phone, as he’d acquired an English accent.
That’s fascinating @LeifGoodwin ! It makes sense that something similar happened in this case since he was just 15 when he switched to English, and French was always his second language. He seems to be increasingly reluctant to speak in French these days although he does fine when pressed. Some of it could be that he’s a bit mad at France for various reasons. (He apparently got to discuss those reasons with Macron, who called him to talk about joining the French Olympic team… ). I guess the French are mad at him, too, for deciding not to.