This thread has got me thinking about something and it's kind of a weird question but I hope you'll understand what I'm getting at:
How come some people never ever lose their accent in their second language? Like, imagine you spoke French from 0-18 then moved to England and only ever spoke English and you were now 65 and still had a French accent. I just can't imagine how you wouldn't ever lose the accent.
Even if I moved to Wales I'd probably end up picking up a slight accent after living there for a few decades. If I moved to Poland and had to learn Polish from scratch and never ever spoke English again, I can't imagine still having accented Polish after forty years.
Is it something physiological? Is it different depending on the age when you learnt your second language? Are some people just accent-deaf?
I speak English with slight Russian accent. Moved here when I was 14. Been in US for almost 30 years now. My accent is not going anywhere. Though it's not strong, I am always asked 'where I"m from and people are never satisfied that I'm from NY. They are much happier when they find out that I was born in Ukraine.
However, that starts the whole new set of questions: no I don't speak Ukrainian, only Russian; yes I can read and write (barely) in Russian but my written grammar sucks; no I'm neither Russian nor Ukrainian; no my nationality wasn't Russian or Ukrainian even when I lived there; yes I am US citizen; no I don't have Russian or Ukrainian citizenship, and the list goes on and on and on - bears in the streets, vodka, balaika, Putin, why do I get cold in the winder when I'm from Russia and it's always freezing there, etc etc etc.
My sister on the other hand was 9 when we moved here and she has no accent. My friend moved here also at age 14 same time as I did and to this day she has very strong Russian accent to the point that at times her English 'sounds' bad.
When I was in Paris last summer I ran into a Georgian woman (country, not state) who moved to Paris about a year earlier. She spoke Georgian, Russian, and French. We started speaking in Russian and she said I speak Russian with English accent. She's probably correct.