The author of a biography of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria claimed that the queen spoke English with a German accent, given that her mother and her governess were German.
4 Answers
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@Lili: Queen Victoria’s ancestry was almost exclusively German.
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She was born and raised in Britain. She may well have picked up something of an accent from her mother and Baroness Lehzen, her governess, as a child, but she also had English nannies, nursemaids, personal maids, and so forth. She was surrounded by far more British people than people who would have been speaking with a German accent.
If you’d met her in middle age, after her mother, Lehzen, and Prince Albert were gone from her life, it’s unlikely that you would have detected any sort of accent.
I really have to wonder about people who are so determined to suggest that the British royals are really Germans, give that their German ancestry is of relatively recent vintage in the family’s history and that they have far more ancestry of other origins.
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Although Queen Victoria spoke English fluently, she nonetheless had a German accent, so two tutors were engaged to help her get rid of it.
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I doubt it as she spent almost her whole life in the UK and spoke English from childhood. In fact, I doubt that her German was perfect. She probably spoke it well enough to get by but certainly not at a native-speaker level.
