My brother and I are heritage speakers of Hindi; as very young children, we spoke mostly Hindi at home and were fluent. However, after my brother went into preschool not really knowing English, our parents really began to make an effort to speak English at home.
Since then, my brother and I have ended up receptively bilingual, but whenever either of us try to say anything in Hindi, it comes out with a really heavy American accent. It seems like a lot of people take for granted that even if heritage speakers lose their language skills, they still maintain a native or near-native accent. But for me, my pronunciation is just super bad in all respects--Hindi has a lot of sounds which don't exist in English which I cannot produce properly or consistently--and it's really making it hard for me to try to learn Hindi. It annoys that me to no end that I know exactly how something should sound yet I cannot get it out of my mouth.
Does anyone else deal with this? If so, any tips on how to overcome this and start pronouncing things right?
It might be worth mentioning that my brother and I are both on the autistic spectrum, so developmental delays may have contributed to the disruption of our language acquisition.
This problem annoys me so much, because it feels like it would have been easier to start from nothing rather than have to try to fix this flawed pronunciation which feels "hardwired" into my brain. I also feel bad that my accent in a language I taught myself (Romanian) is far, far "better" than my accent in my mother tongue--not that some accents are inherently better than others. You know what I mean.
I also feel like I hear a lot of heritage speakers of Hindi around me saying that even if their Hindi isn't perfect, at least they don't have accents. I, of course, then feel bad. This is probably dumb, but this whole pronunciation situation is the main reason I avoid speaking in Hindi, and it's really holding me back from learning Hindi (something I really want to do!). If I can't get my accent to be native-like, does anyone at least have any advice on how to feel better about it?
Thanks a lot!
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