I was chatting with my barang friends a few day ago. During our discussion, we happened to talk about Cambodian accent. Then i told them that Cambodian doesn't have accent unlike Vietnamese or Thai. I said they couldn't find out if the person is Cambodian by just listening to them when they speak English. To me, i felt like Cambodians have various accents, some people speak really good and some are really bad. Frankly i don't know if i was right. Please let me know if you think Cambodian has an accent.

Yes, Cambodians have several accents as do Thais and Vietnamese. In fact, if a language is wide spread enough or sometime separated by mountains some speakers who live n a valley cannot understand the
the accent or the dialect of another neighboring valley as is the case in Austria or Switzerland. I'm certain most hoch Deutsch speakers would say, "yeah it's probably German, but I'll be damned if I know what he means. Most Cambodians can identify other Cambodian speakers from villages bordering on Vietnam or Thailand, by both the accent and/or diction(choice of words). I'm certain accent identification is more wide spread than this, but these are accents forming part of a dialect that even I can hear(with my foreign ears(I stole that phrase from "little salary") For instance I would hazard a guess that most Cambodians could hear the accent of a khmai leu bilingual speaker.

As for Cambodians speaking English, unless they grew up bilingually, yes i can hear a definite "Cambodian accent" even in very talented speakers.

It's not an issue with me, but I think this post is more suited for the Cambodian language and culture branch.

Common samouth...
Even you should have an accent... Same as mine actually...
When I am in PP people sometimes can hear Sihanoukville accent hidden behind my heavy french accent (shows with the way we say number 5 per example).
Same as I can guess someone us from kompong thom or siem riep.

Now I also think I see that you mean if a Cambodian speak english it is difficult to guess what country he is from ? And indeed there seem to be a lack of general accent as a country.

Well for me, most Cambodians have trouble with the final 's" or 'z' sound in plurals and third person singular verbs. Then frequently the word order comes straight from Cambodian. Also past passive forms are frequently avoided and awkward present past tense mixtures are substituted. Yep, there are certainly telltale signs.

Yes, I should have said khmer speaking good english... A rarity ?

Talking about accent I love the Malaysian/Singaporean English accent. So much I tend to adopt it while speaking with someone from there...

I think the op means tones, not accents.

I think in Khmer languge , we don't have accent and intonation. My teacher said Cambdians can study second language easily because we don't have accent and intonation in our language. Moerover we have many consonants sub consonants and vowels. We don't have problem with mother tongue interfer like Vietnamese, Thai, Indian or Japanese. We can speak like foriegners and they are difficult to recognize us where we are from. But we have problem with end sound. We always swallow end sound because we don't speak end sound, we spell them together or those letters are silent letter.

starkmonster wrote:I think the op means tones, not accents.

Dialects...