It's not that simple. All babies have the potential to learn the sounds of any language. But at a very early age, I think it's like 4 years or something, the sound system the child makes becomes fixed. So a teenager or adult finds it much much harder to learn unfamiliar sounds.Originally Posted by giovanni
Accents are not the "accustomment" of the mouth to a certain way of speaking. It's actually more to do with the brain. My mouth, tongue, throat can move into the position of all the sounds of any language. But my brain doesn't know how to tell all my vocal organs how to move in the right position, time, sequence, ect. to produce that sound.
Like when I started learning Russian I heard the sound Ы which doesn't exist in English. I heard the sound but my brain didn't know how to exactly recreate the tongue position and such in my mouth so that I could make the sound myself.