Question: does your accent affect your rate of learning, for example do french people learn faster than welsh people?

Damien Hall answered on 18 Jun 2011:

No, accent doesn’t really affect your rate of learning – assuming that when you learn stuff in school, the teacher is speaking in the language that you first learned from your parents (linguists call that your ‘native language’ or your ‘mother tongue’). If French people are being taught in French, Welsh people in Welsh, English and American (etc) people in English, and so on, then they can all learn as fast as each other.

If you’re talking about different accents of English, it’s the same – Cockneys can learn just as fast or slowly as Welsh people, Scottish people and so on. Some people think that, if you speak with a certain accent, you automatically sound clever or stupid depending on what the accent is, but it’s not really true. Some people think a Birmingham accent makes you sound stupid and a posh accent makes you sound clever, but some posh people find it much more difficult to learn than some Birmingham people!

If you’re talking about people from those countries being taught in English, then that might be different. The Welsh person might learn in English faster than the French person would, because most Welsh people these days learn English when they are a baby (and they might learn Welsh as well, depending on where they’re from). For most French people, though, English is a foreign language, so they might learn more slowly if they were being taught in English.