Two men discussing her accent

That one guy, insisting her accent was fake, is an all time wa---r. "Oh, you don't want to see my dissertation, trust me."

Indeed! we don't.

With all due respect, if you're living in New York, around New Yorkers, etc., I don't think you're going to devolve into a French accent. I have many friends who grew up with parents who grew up in Italy, Poland, etc., and they all speak with an American accent. I also know that many people devolve into different accents if you're living there on a continuous basis...I know many Northerners who live down South for a few years, and start talking with a Southern accent. I'd even say Madonna's British accent is due to her living there on a regular basis. Obviously, no one can say for sure, but Maier's accent appears to be an affectation.

I agree with the OP; accents can be very odd things and a heavy enough influence from a source that is a large part of a person's life can transmute an accent.

Her mother was French, Vivian herself was fluent in French, that's got to have an effect. And she frequently visited her mother's French village and reconnected with that side of her heritage. I know British ex-pats in America who would sound a little American, then after they came back from their annual visit home to the UK, they sounded British all over again from hanging out with their family there.

I'm also one of those people with an accent people can't pin down until some of my background comes out, and no, it's not an affectation. I was born and grew up in London surrounded by both "posh" and Cockney accents, but my mother was Scottish and my father was from Liverpool and sounded like the Beatles. As a child I usually sounded like a Londoner, but there were things I would say that came out in my mother's accent, and other things I said with my father's Liverpudlian lilt. I can still sound a little like either to this day.

Layer on top of that twenty years living in the United States -- and my heaviest transmutation was into a generic American sound, but not 100%. It's a hybrid accent I have now, and none of it's "faking."

In fact, now that I live in London again, I'm so self conscious of my odd, mostly American sound that I fake the London part of it more than anything! Just to fit in.

It seems to me that Ms Maier was a less self conscious person than I am, and more unafraid to be different, hence she let her mixed up accent freak-flag fly more than I have the courage to do.

I can see arguments on both sides, but I'm favoring an affected accent - although with the advantage of exposure to the French members of her family, so one with some plausibility to it. The French don't drag out vowels the same way we do and she really sounded like she was stretching them in a very American fashion. It seems to me that she might have taken the accent on as part of her disguise - like the variations on her name. It was an excellent red herring as most people who thought they knew her wouldn't have assumed that she spent at least some portion of her childhood (maybe most of it?) in New York - a place she might have wanted to forget about. (It would help to know exactly how long she spent in France and at what ages, also when she stopped living with her mother. Hard to know what her influences were without that).

Wow, I posted this in December and I'm only responding now, sorry about that. I see both sides like someone else mentioned. And I completely get that there are some people who are raised by parents who don't speak any English at all or do and have a heavy accent and the kids themselves grow up to have no accent at all but it's also possible that some people do develop an accent from their families. I think it might depend on the person to be honest. But for the man to say it as if he knew for certain that she were affecting a fake accent was what annoyed me the most.

i agree!!! mr linguistics there was so glib. he may have done his research on straight ethnic accents but there's no research to be made thru life experiences. my father is greek and i picked up a few accents on only a few words but have no accent in general. she went to france a lot and had her french mother around. maybe not have her mother's full accent but enough just from listening and being around it.

i got so mad when he called her accent fake. ugh!

I think that she could perfectly speak English as a native New Yorker, but she took up the fake French accent to disguise her real personality. i know it sounds weird but she seems to have been very eccentric. See how she was changing her name continuously, the spelling, how she did not want to give out her real name to the shop keeper? If an expert in accents says her accent was fake why can't we believe him? Yes her mother was French, but she was born and raised up in New York, even if she learnt French from her mother English would have been her main language. Even if she had travelled to France with her mother it would have not been enough to completely change someone's accent. In order to have a true French accent she would have have to leave the US early enough as to not speak English yet and live in France at least until she was 15-16. Even younger kids at 12 or so are able to lose a foreign accent. Even if she was not so social, what about school? She must have gone to school in New York. I think it was all part of her eccentricity, to hide herself, to not reveal who she was.