If you speak a foreign language, should you put on an accent of that language? At the moment I'm living in Italy and this has been something that's really bothering me. My friend always puts on a very strong accent but I can't help but feel like an idiot doing it. That doesn't mean to say that I'm wandering around like Del Boy, but if I heard an Italian speaking English with a London accent (especially if they make on average one serious grammatical error per sentence, as I do), I couldn't help but think of them as - well, a bit of a knob, really.