I’ve spent most of my life around Chicago, but haven’t entirely lost the Piedmont accent of my youth, saying “core” for “car” and “pin” for both “pen” and “pin,” especially if I’m tired (“tored”). It can also be triggered by speaking with someone with a similar accent; the most uncomfortable time (“tahm”) was when it came out in full force completely unconsciously and I had to keep my subconscious talking for the whole conversation, because I haven’t talked like that for 50 years and can’t do it on purpose.
At work lately I have been calling a lot of folks down south, both Virginians and non-Virginians, and it’s been coming back. I sometimes think I should keep it on all the time because it doesn’t require conscious effort, like sounding like a generic suburbanite can. Then I call someone in Boston and have to shift back because some people view people with Southern accents as idiots. (One Boston client seems to have hired a woman from the Bronx to do their messages because her accent amuses them. After all, nobody thinks Bostonians talk funny, :rolleyes: )
So (originally from Minnesota so questions, especially rhetorical ones, begin with “so”), does your accent change according to your audience?
Yes! I was just talking about this with a friend today.
I grew up living in several different countries and figured it was an adaptive holdover from being a kid wanting to fit in fast in a new environment. Give me 20 minutes talking to someone from Texas or the south and I’m drawling “y’all”, or mimicking a Boston accent, or a South African one, or Indian or Middle Eastern (more intonation than accent) or whatever. To the extent that I feel self-conscious about it and sometimes point out that I’m not mocking or making an effort, it just happens.
I do. Phlufia or Texas comes out on occasion. Otherwise people haven’t a clue where I’m from. I’m not sure where the Texas came from. I lived there, but people in El Paso don’t sound like they’re from Texas.
I dunno if it’s exactly code-switching tho. Code-switching always seemed to me to be a mostly conscious effort to match a preferred or ‘better’ accent or speech pattern for the environment.
When I switch, it’s not conscious at all.
My personal theory is that I have an overabundance of mirror neurons, and that makes me prone to mimic the person I’m interacting with at the time. I base this on the fact that my accent is entirely dependent on who I am talking with, and by my weird and constant (according to my friends and family) habit of physically copying the person I’m with - body posture, gestures, the works.
The really irritating part of it all is that I don’t do it on purpose, so it makes it useless as far as consciously imitating someone, or mimicking an accent. Really frustrating.
The OP seems to be asking about adjusting one’s regional accent when speaking English among people from some region or other (as opposed to, say, adjusting one’s sociolect to a given situation, which we all do).
I don’t think I do this in English. I just don’t feel like I can fake a different regional accent then my own – if I tried to talk like a Brit to a Brit, or like a Southerner (US) to a Southerner, or a Jamaican to a Jamaican, I would sound foolish at best, and appear to be mocking at worst.
Strangely, I do do this sometimes when speaking my second language, Spanish (learned as an adult, to maybe 90% fluency). For some reason, I feel confident enough to slip into a bit of Yucatecan accent when in Yucatan, or Honduran accent when there, and even a bit of Iberian (badly, probably) when talking to someone from Spain. Not sure why; maybe I know my English interference (“accent”) is surely so noticeable anyway, I might as well have a little fun and try out a regional Spanish accent.
Lasciel, FYI, code-switching need not be “consciously” done. Usually it isn’t, at least not in the sense of actively deciding from moment to moment which language or dialect to employ – and often not even in the sense if actively deciding from situation to situation whether to speak one language/dialect or to mix 'em up (usually informal, homey contexts).
Correcting what I wrote two posts up: the adapting we all do is among formal and informal registers of speech, which is mostly about lexemes (vocabulary) and grammar but also can include intonation and pronunciation (accent, more or less).
Only for some people are the registers so different that they can be considered sociolects.
My twang becomes more pronounced when visiting my native East Tennessee (at least according to my wife). I found that I had to speed up my speech to be understood when I moved to Brooklyn. I’m not sure if it slowed down much when I moved to the DC area. I’m sometimes told my twang is mild now, but that depends on the hearer.
I don’t travel enough any more to be exposed to different accents. One thing that I used to do would be to pick up accents and speech patterns from whatever book I was reading.
I take that back. If I’m around coworkers who immigrated from Ireland I’ll quickly pick up their accent if I don’t watch myself.
Oh, cripes, I don’t really have a copy of it. She probably has a bound one, but it’s like 300 pages, and not in digital format. I’ll ask her to recommend a book on code-switching that you can get from Amazon.
I tone down and take the sharp edges off my native accent consciously. There are several Americans in my department, and all of us but one does this; Holy God does she have a loud, stereotypical HI GUYS!!! mid-west accent. She makes us cringe and self-conscious about how we sound. She’s been here 25 years and claims that she speaks with a pronounced ‘British accent.’
I try to keep it softened and quiet at home as a courtesy as well, but when I’m on the phone to my mother, it’s a full-blooded paint-stripper Mid-Atlantic accent. Mr Boods can’t leave the room fast enough; the first time he heard me speaking in my natural accent he asked me why in the heck I was talking in a silly voice. Vowels are not a bladed weapon, he says; ‘Squirrel,’ ‘shower,’ and ‘orange’ have more than one syllable.
Switching out accents are also useful when one is trying to make a point. A recent example: I was on the London Tube headed out to Waterloo, and it was fairly crowded. A young woman got on with her two kiddies, one in a push chair, and the other a walking infant/toddler. Her own mum was helping the toddler. I got up and asked the older woman softly if she would like my seat (which prompted someone to help out the younger woman). As I spoke to the older woman, some arsebadger in a suit who’d been watching attempted to slither around behind me and steal the seat. I switched instantly to Ratso Rizzo, put out a foot to stop him, and snarled, ‘Not you, Clyde,’ then resumed speaking to the older woman in civilised tones.
Mr Boods changes his accent as well – as we get closer we get to his stomping grounds (a village in SE England), his accents drops down through several socio-economic levels. There is (to my ears) a distinct difference in how he speaks around the house and on conference calls (he works from home) and when he’s sat in his mum’s front room with a tea mug balanced on his lap.
My students do it at school, as well; I’ve got a student from Dorset who usually talks in the plummy Cambridge tones of her fiance, but can really crank up her native ‘oooo, errrr’ when it suits in class.
Speaking simpler and slower English with someone whose English is perfectly understandable but “not so good”, consciously adjusting the level to where they’re comfortable (I don’t think I’ve ever done that in Spanish or Catalan except for little kids, but my French coworkers did it for me in French).
Dropping my local dialects (yes, I have several) in favor of “newscaster Spanish” or, conversely, picking up one of the locals.
Being one of those people who pick up the accents and mannerisms of those we’re speaking to, even without meaning to. This has occasionally gotten me in hot water with people who thought I was mocking them. I’m not, promise, the accents “stick”!
The OP asked about accents and yet we ended up discussing code switching. Isn’t code switching about the actual language used, not just the pronunciation?