I have had years of theatre training - handy in some ways not so much when it comes to avoiding accents.
I spent the day with someone from Tennessee and it took a week to eliminate the strange accent. I try to stop it from happening but it just happens.
I just apologize before it happens now.
I actually picked up a former coworkers stutter for a time, which was frustrating.
Another accent sponge here. And I know why it is - when I speak Hindi I can speak with a perfect Hindi accent, when I speak English I sound - well, I’m not sure. I guess Yankee, but I don’t sound much like a hick nor NYC nor long island nor Boston so I don’t know what that leaves. But my POINT, before I derailed myself, was that I’ve become so accustomed to switching accents back and forth without thinking that it’s fairly easy for me to slide into a new one, too.
Extreme non-accent-sponge here. I wish I could pick up accents… it would make my French a lot more understandable.
I wonder whether this has anything to do woth learning multiple languages when young? Were those of you who pick up accents easily exposed to more then one language as a kid?
My accent has been pretty stable for about 50 years now: somewhere between Received Standard and Educated Australia – the result of 7 years of childhood in England, and the rest of my childhood in Australia. I’ve now lived in the US for 7 years, and while I use a few words of American English to avoid misunderstanding (e.g., “elevator” instead of “lift” or “sidewalk” instead of “pavement”), my accent remains very non-Mid-Western.
I don’t think it’s obnoxious to absorb an accent naturally. For some people, that happens really fast; for others, it doesn’t happen at all. However, if someone with, say, a Southern accent who was from America, were to go to England and the first words out of his/her mouth were “bloody” this and “he’s a wanker,” complete with phony British accent, yeah, that’d be annoying.
Personally, I probably sound different when I talk to my husband’s family (from India) vs. when I talk to my family (American) vs. when I talk to my friends from London. I also have a Chilean accent when I speak Spanish because that’s where I lived when I was learning. But I’d never presume to affect an accent just to fit in. It’d sound too pretentious, in my opinion.
It looks like some people can’t even help picking up accents immediately, while others can’t pick up an accent if they try. I hope this will people understand that some of us aren’t pretentiously faking an accent just because we speak differently from one year to another. (In my case, from one conversation to another).
Madonna has been surrounded by Brits for years. I think there’s plenty of reason for her to talk that way.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, has a voice coach to help him keep his Austrian accent after forty years in America. Hate on him.
Another sponge here. Like others have mentioned, I pick up everything – accents, speech patterns, stutters, and other speech impediments – whatever the person I’m speaking to has.
Since I have a slight stutter myself (which is rarely detectable unless I’m stressed or tired), anyone who comes to talk to me with a stutter can set me off, and I have to work very hard not to seem like I’m mocking the other person. (Once in a while it gets so impossible that I just have to tell the other person about my own stutter and apologise that I’m getting all tangled up.)
Also, when I moved to St Louis and began to live in an up-and-coming (and still edgy) mixed neighborhood, I realized I had to be consciously aware of what accent and speech patterns I was using, because African-American style speech does not sound right coming out of this lily white girl! There are some people you don’t want to insult, let’s just say.
I wasn’t exposed to anything but Spanish and English of various types. I can’t learn another language for shit (I tried both German and Spanish–even having a Spanish-speaking boyfriend didn’t help me), but I apparently pick up other American English idioms and inflections and just never let them go. I guess everyone I talk to leaves a little bit of accent behind.
Well, I was exposed to some German when I was 1-2 years old (Dad was stationed there for a little while), in daycare. I didn’t study a foreign language until I went to England at the age of 12: I learned German, French, and Yorkshire at the same time. 
Apparently I pick up north american accents extremely easily. An pick up idioms from anywhere without a problem.
I often get asked where I’m from, even if I’m in the city where I grew up (and was born about 90k away)
The problem with picking up accents is that if I watch a movie or a TV series, then go to work, I’ll start speaking sort of like that. I once watched a whole bunch of Firefly, then went to work… I got a whole lot of wierd looks that day. Or watching a movie with a Mass. accent and going to pahk thuh cah undah thuh ruf.
But I work with a few Brits. So I’ll use their idioms. Like when I don’t like someone the’re a “fucking wanker” but I’ll say it with a southern Ontario accent (Though British-isms aren’t really considered strange to use here.)
As far as accents when I use a different language, I don’t think I can pick one up (though my only language that I really have any training in is French, and I can’t speak it well, but I can understand it just fine)
I grew up in a pretty-much monolingual English environment (small-city Ontario), with only some French from grade eight. I didn’t hit any polylingual areas until I went to university.
I speak French and was in French Immersion for ten years - I wish I was still as fluent - although I have been told my accent when i speak French is superb.
I didn’t really have any exposure to foreign languages until I was 12. I did a French immersion program at school for 5 years, which left me with a french accent from Alsace (where my first French teacher came from). I then spent a year in Germany (in Lower Saxony) as an exchange student with Rotary. For the longest time, whenever I spoke French or German, people would ask me what part of France or Germany I came from.
Even now, living in the Middle East, I get a lot of compliments on my excellent accent and pronunciation in Arabic. Most people can easily tell what part of Bahrain my husband is from, based on my accent in Arabic.
I have the same knack in English too. Being Australian, I often found in Europe that people couldn’t understand my accent, so I had to pretend an English accent to be understood. I guess it eventually stuck since nowadays most people can’t tell where I’m from. When I was a flight attendant, I had an English guy in first class on a flight out of Sana’a in Yemen tell me how relieved he was to finally speak with another British person after 6 months of broken English and American accents! I had to let him down gently!!!
My favourite story though is about one time I was in a pub in London with an English friend. We were sitting at the bar having our pints when we noticed this guy was staring at us down the bar. I walked up to him and lambasted him in a Billy Connolly style Scottish accent! Turns out he was Scottish and wanted to know which part of Scotland I was from!!! I told him he wouldn’t know, although I would concede it was north of Newcastle (meaning the Newcastle in Australia, not the one in northern England!). I eventually 'fessed up and we all had a good laugh!
Some people should try even harder to become an accent sponge.
I have mentioned it here on the boards before, but I knew a woman in Berlin who learned to speak German, but could not shake her Alabama accent.
Listening to her massacre German with a thick southern drawl was hysterically funny.
It might have been funny to you but it probably wasn’t to her. I’ve never lost my Texas* twang and I left Texas in 1963. If I could lose it, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t even try; it is a part of me and I strongly believe in being a what you see is what you get kind of person. Why should I attempt to change my accent to fit in with others, especially others who find my accent hilarious? I often find other accents hilarious but I would never be so rude as to mock them.
*Bear in mind that I hate Texas and have nothing but bad memories of the place; leaving there was possibly the only smart thing I’ve ever done. Still, I was born there, reached adulthood there, and was at least partly shaped there. Like Popeye, I am what I am and that’s all what I am.