I come from a country where there are over 40 ethnic groups. This is not including the Indians, Arabs and Europeans who have settled in the country. English is the official language and the language of instructions in schools, from Kindergarten, while Swahili is the national language. The English spoken in my country is more British oriented since we were once a colony of Britain. All the various ethnic groups individually speak different mother tongues or languages together with English and Swahili. The average person therefore speaks at least three languages.  

Most people, particularly those from the countryside will speak with an accent heavily influenced  by their mother tongue when speaking another language. This is offcourse based on the fact that their tongue does a trick on them based on the first language they acquired or perhaps they think in their mother tongue hence the problem with how letters are received in the brain. We jokingly make fun of our accents because the accents together with physical features can betray one’s ethnicity.  

Not everyone exposes their mother tongue accent when communicating in another language. Some people, particularly those born in the cities, will speak without the accent associated with their ethnicity.  This however does not mean they speak English like the English because they are not English. Before I came to the United States of America I never thought much about my accent when it came to speaking English. I speak my mother tongue and three other languages but I do not have the common accent attributed to people from my ethnic background.  I have used English at every level of communication since my childhood but that does not mean that I speak like the English by the very fact that I am not English.

You can imagine my surprise when I came to America and I realized that even though I spoke good English some people could not “understand” me.  I realized quickly that British English is very different from American English.  Some words are pronounced and spelled differently while certain words are just not used in America. I once told someone that something would be ready in a fortnight and they looked at me as if I was speaking a different language. A fortnight for those who do not know is two weeks. I also discovered certain words are spelt missing certain vowels in American English.