> The results were fascinating: people who intended to settle acquired a local accent quicker than those here temporarily. As a 26-year immigrant of Germany i

> The results were fascinating: people who intended to settle acquired a local accent quicker than those here temporarily. As a 26-year immigrant of Germany i feel compelled to point out that there's more to it than that. i've known and worked with many, MANY people from different countries and have known exactly four who had the ability to eventually lose a non-native accent. Two were from Scandinavia (Sweden and Norway, respectively) and two particularly language-gifted women from Germany, one of whom i thought was British for the first six months i knew her. The overwhelmingly vast majority of people do not simply lose their native accents. Native-born US'ians, like me, in particular. i have yet to meet a US'ian who can completely hide the fact that they're a native English speaker when speaking German, not because of the vocabulary or grammar, but the accent is always a dead giveaway (though it's frequently mistaken for Dutch or British by native Germans). On the other hand, i have completely lost my regional US dialect (primarily Texan) and now speak English with that i have come to call an "international English" or "expat English" dialect which cannot be specifically tied down to one English-speaking region. i've been told by native German speakers, but cannot really judge, that it's easy to hear that i have spent most of my time in Germany in Bavaria because that's the regional slang i tend to use. After recently moving to northern Germany, i'm finding that dropping that southern-German slang requires a conscious effort.