Having an accent; being fluent

I have this Russian colleague of mine who has been living in the UK and then in the US for the last past 6 years. No need to say that by now, she is quite fluent in English, and doesn't have a problem neither to understand nor, more importantly, to express herself. But she has this one hang-up: she speaks with an accent.

What's the big deal. Even France, which is not especially a large country, has a fair share of regional accents (e.g. Paris, Lille, Toulouse, Strasbourg) -- and I am not even talking about other French-speaking countries or regions, where accents are even stronger for us. Now, when we talk about English at large, does it make any sense to try to speak English without an accent? Who speaks English without an accent? English? Irish? Americans? Indians? (More than one billion of them --if size matters, they ought to be the standard). And then again, where in the US: New-York? Boston? Austin?

But that does not matter to her. She does not have the accent of any of these native-speakers, so this ought to mean that she is not fluent. And that's how she spends her days asking people around her to correct her pronounciation and to repeat words endlessly until she thinks she got it right.

While chatting with her, though, I learned that even though Russia is so large, people speak the same Russian with the same accent from Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok. They do not even have Russian dialects, whereas tiny France is packed with local languages like breton, provençal, basque, alsacien, corse... Could that explain her monotheist attitude towards what a language should be?

Some people didn't get the picture yet, and still tease her sometimes because of some mispronounciation. The latest one was a 'they want more presence' that apparently sounded like a 'they want more prisons'. That obviously did not improve her hang-up; she shamefully asked the guy to repeat and correct her, as she has done since I know her. Just to make a point, to both of them, I ask her to be cautious: the other guy being Indian, I warned her about getting the Indian accent, which certainly would sound much weirder, coming from a Russian, than her pure and fully functional Russian accent. For different reasons, none of them laughed, though.

I understand her, somehow. During my first internship abroad in the UK a while back, I was trying hard to get rid as much as I could of my French accent. But although I could distinctly perceive what made my French accent -- no pronounciation of h's, weak p's and t's, i's pronounced like ee's -- London was not the best place to understand what would make me sound really British, because there is no such thing. You have to choose your side: cockney, or Eton, or whatever.

What really changed my mindset, though, is when I met that girl that found my French accent 'charming'.

Charming, eh? Well, as long as you can understand me, and even if from time to time you will have to ask me whether I meant to share presence or prisons with you, that will do it for me.