Some anecdotes, my half-sister and I pick up new accents in a couple of weeks. She used to go split time between her mother in the south and my parents and she'd come back to us with a rich accent full of local colloquialisms. We'd send her back a few weeks later wearing our accents and colloquialisms.

I've found that I subconsciously do the same thing. For example, I spent a couple weeks in Australia for business and came back saying "How ya goin'", "mate", "cheers", "no worries", "good on ya" that sort of thing for a day or so till I readapted. Same thing for other countries a bit, but native English countries are the worst. I came back from a month in Ireland with a transitional accent that took me a full week to shake off.

My wife is South Korean and over the years I've adopted her Konglishisms and we communicate (very effectively I might add) in a kind of pidgin which does absolutely nothing to help her accent and grammar struggles. She actually doesn't know I do it, because I've somehow managed to fit my patterns into that weird gap where Korean doesn't translate into English -- e.g. I'll use singular nouns instead of plural nouns since Korean doesn't make any distinction.

It's also kind of embarrassing in group gatherings when I'll revert to pidgin with her and then a more normal English with somebody else. I actually can't help it, it's like an automatic code-switch that I have to actively suppress. I can feel myself, almost out of my control, measuring the other speaker and adapting my speech patterns to theirs. Entire swaths of vocabulary and idiomatic phrases will move into and out of my working memory like slippery bars of wet soap as I change groups of people.

When I worked a sales job, I'd use a brief conversation to try and adapt to the customer's style of speech. I started using sales-y phrases and when I'd come back to talk to engineering I had to code-switch to talk to the engineers, and sometimes translating from the code I was just in to the one I was in now would feel like doing heavy math.

I actually can't force it either. I can't dredge back up forgotten accents. I can't go "Australian" or "Irish" or "Konglish" when I'm not in those milieus. It's bizarre and kind of troubling at the same time. I grew up in a heavily multi-cultural area and wonder if this is an artifact of that upbringing.

My father on the other hand was born and raised with a deep American country accent. In 1949, When he was 16 he ran away from home and went to live in a major metropolitan city with its own rich accent tapestry. Unfortunately, his country accent marked him in the kinds of negative ways that country accents do in cities and he struggled finding good jobs, good friends, etc.. It took him a couple years of daily study to shed his accent and turn it into a "neutral" middle American one and this stuck with him to this day. He actually is unable to revert to his childhood accent (my mother has asked him many times). Fortunately, he has a number of brothers, most of whom kept their original regional accent...with 1 other exception.

My uncle fell hopelessly in love with a Puerto Rican woman who was unable to overcome deep cultural differences in the U.S. They married, and he moved with her back home and stayed till they both passed on. He had a thick Puerto Rican accent and spoke Puerto Rican Spanish at home. He claimed that he had lived there so long that he no longer thought in English, but the local Spanish dialect. His children are decently bilingual, but their children are not.

It reminds me a bit of James Dresnok. He was one of the few American defectors to North Korea. There's a couple astonishing documentaries about him ("Crossing the Line" and "An American in North Korea"). In his interviews he speaks in English, with much of his original Richmond, Virginia accent intact. His English has become a bit stilted over the years, due to lack of use no doubt. He's not nearly as interesting as his son, a blond haired blue eyed man born and raised in North Korea, with Korean as his native tongue. When he speaks English, if I close my eyes, he has a Korean accent. It's kind of mind blowing.

My wife is a fan of Project Runway, and a few seasons ago they had a contestant (Anya Ayoung-Chee) on from the West Indies. I heard her before I saw her and recognized the accent, hearing it on in the other room and having grown up with a few friends from there. Then one day I watched the show with her and was shocked to see that this contestant was ethnically Asian. It was fascinating watching her talk, and expecting the normal kind of Asian-speaking-Englishisms, but instead getting a rich accent from Trinidad.

There's also a family friend who's nearing retirement. Also from South Korea but who speaks almost flawless English (except for a few small insurmountable details), we had a conversation about people's perceptions of foreigners based on their accents. She said that over the years, and she's seen this a number of times, foreigners who come and start to perfect their English reach a kind of uncanny valley where, as their proficiency nears native speaker levels, the small things they still do wrong are magnified. Most of them actually forcibly regress their proficiency because they find they get treated better. She said that they feel like having a worse accent makes people perceive them as a smart foreigner who learned another language rather than a stupid native speaker who can't talk right.

Finally my wife, she's struggled mightily with this specific topic. From her largely unpronounceable-to-Americans name to working in a professional setting with largely Americans. For a while she dealt with this by getting a very good job with other East Asians doing development work. But she's found herself working with 100% Americans recently and feels very overwhelmed by it all. She's very outgoing and conversational, and people warm up to her quickly. But they rapidly overestimate her English proficiency. Her accent hasn't exactly faded over the years, but she's managed to make herself just clear enough that 95% of people understand her 95% of the time.

Even after 15 years, she still confused pronouns, plurals, articles and particles and other basic English. She reads English books for an hour or so every day for practice, and our conversations are filled with small corrections from me on minor points of grammar, or explanations of idioms or slang. She also hyper corrects Koreanisms, and turns words with "p"'s into words with "f"s (Korean doesn't have an "f", so when they loan-in words that do, they typically use a "p" or and "h" sound, turning "fighting" into "hwighting", she's simply reversing this). I've had to reverse translate lots of questions where she's looking for a "fan" to do some cooking.

The truth is, she just doesn't have an ear for languages. She gets by, very competently and proficiently I'd add, by keeping her sentences simple and conversational. But it definitely has profound effects for her in formal business situations. She'll get nervous and fall back to polite-Korean-towards-seniors behavior while speaking English -- nervous smiles at everything and an almost pathological inability to have more than simple conversations involving basic greetings, on topics that she's an expert in. It's excruciating to watch, seeing all this brilliance locked up by language barriers.

I know she's highly intelligent, and we spend many late nights going over slides and papers for her work, fixing grammar issues here and there, letting her practice lectures and presentations.

It's tough, language is tough, and it's taught me that people with accents should be listened to extra carefully because they may just have some real smarts in them, screaming to get out.