How do english speakers recognize an italian native speaker who is speaking english?

Question

I' mean when an italian speak english, what are his usual phonetical characteristics? (example: accents, way to prounonce some kind of words, mistakes ecc..)

Answer 1

Apart from the vowel sounds, there is a tendency for Italians to make words feminine - not in the gender sense, but in that they end in a vowel - even though they don't in English. So, 'not' becomes 'notta', etc.

English has at least 44 phonemes and over 60 different sounds including consonant variations depending on position (allophones), vowels and diphthongs so it is not surprising that Romance language speakers have difficulty in imitating English pronunciation. Spanish, for example, has only about 30 phonemes and Italian can't be far different.

A further characteristic of Italian is the strong tonic accent.

L'Italiano non si parla, ma si canta . . .

Answer 2

Italian Native Speaker

Answer 3

I'm American but live in Italy. I would have to say the accent and the pauses between words/sentences. I can also tell if someone is a French-speaker, German-speaker, Spanish-speaker, etc by their accent (it doesn't matter if they are speaking in English or Italian either).

Answer 4

apart from the perceived musicality of the language italians complain that english speakers chop their word endings so they would overemphasise this as heard by us;a common mistake is to insert a vowel between two consonants which would not go together in their language;e.g sandAwich-assignment of gender to pronounds etc etc.

Answer 5

accent like everybody who are not english speaker , of course some mistake .
But when you are 9 month somewhere you can get the accent of english
I never get accent of canadian english speaker even I studied nine month there .
When I speak english they said im from France, but I Belgian !!

Answer 6

Possibly the accent, how they pronounce the R, and the prepositions used, sometimes it's not the same in English

Answer 7

yes, and most other nationalities too, within reason. Its the accent, and hand movements are a real give away for Italians.

Answer 8

From everything you've listed but we are mainly labelled as Italians since we are continuously moving our hands (I'm Italian as you)

Answer 9

using the singular term instead of the plural (or the other way around) the accent, etc

Answer 10

There are certain "tells". For instance both itlalian and french add gender to certain things:

American: My car is busted!
French: Ze car, she not doing so well uh!
Itlaian: My car, she is a not a doing too well no!
German: Mine Car is kaput!
Canadien: Hey there, my car is broken eh!
Asian (blanket): my car no doing well. (asians are the worst at conjugating the english word "to be" and it is also hard for them to understand plurals).
Sweedish dutch: Shvorde Shvorde Svorde burda vorde!