My accent is not detected by many people I meet, unless I speak more loudly. There are a couple of reasons for that, but one of them is that Americans just speak more loudly than Australians do.
My sisters, who have AUS accents, never have any USA accent recognised by anyone, but both have retained the American volume. People either think they are entertainers, or just very loud.
That’s strange you should say that. I grew up in Northern Virginia, and whenever i visit further north- such as Upstate NY and even up into PA, everyone comments on my Southern accent. So I think Northern Virginia definitely has some sort of slight Virginia accent. Its just very subtle there. If you really pay attention you’ll hear it. It takes time. South Carolina accent would be slightly different. There is no such thing as a non-accent. But it is true that Northern Virginia is a melting pot these days . It used to be Southern.
We taught that the age was about 13 or 14. Some a bit more and some a bit less. We were dealing with Original Spanish speakers who lived with parents in S Florida who never learned English and continued to speak Spanish in the home.
A double zombie thread.
I will just add that I lived in Philadelphia from birth till past 25–in fact, I was hardly ever out of the city, a few weeks in Atlantic City excepted. Still I have had several people who were familiar with the Philly accent swear I don’t have it. But every Canadian picks me out as American instantly, although I cannot pick out Canadians at all. Every dialect test I have ever taken identifies me as Philadelphian. One said, “You are as Philly as cheese steak”.
My godson moved to Scotland with his family around the age of 10. The elder sister would have been 12.
13 years later she still has a totally English accent, he talks like a native Glaswegian.
Another bunch of friends moved to Australia. Father was an Australian, mother from the Channel Islands (odd accent) but kids all born and bred in England. When they moved their son and elder daughter would have been around 11 and 9, the younger 6. They have moved back a year or two ago - son is now 18 so others are 16 and 13. Son talks like an English lad with just a touch of twang, girls like Australians and no shift seen in the last couple of years.
On that admittedly tiny sample I suspect the onset of puberty is a major determinate of your fixed accent.
I’ve lived in Scotland the past eight years, obviously I will always talk like the Londoner I am but am gradually acquiring words that my English friends pick up on. “Wee” is a favourite. But nothing on the accent side.
We moved to the UK from Montreal when my girls were nearly six. They’re 16 now and their accent is mostly unchanged…mostly due to the fact that they do not attend a British school so they have been exposed to accents from all over the world.
Me, too. I can flip accents easily. After studying in the UK for a year, I came home speaking in a more clipped accent.
I grew up in a part of Florida that has a “southern” accent. I have a bit of one. Hey, thirty years there…
But when I moved to Boston, I got rid of it damned quick – I felt like it was saying “I’m a rube!”. I didn’t pick up a Boston accent, but I smoothed out much of the southern accent. Except for saying “y’all” and how I pronounce a few words (don’t ever ask me to say “tire iron”).
I don’t know if an accent is set for life or not, but I know people who have *intentionally *kept their accents (like friends who moved from the UK to the US in their early teens). And people, like me, who’ve intentionally suppressed their accent.
So maybe it can also be a decision.
Interestingly, my brother is 6 yrs younger than I am. We went to the same schools and grew up in the same household, and he has a MUCH heavier accent. You know how David Sedaris describes his brother “The Rooster”? Yeah, that kind.
Most languages have most sounds, but there are a few that are not very common (like the th in English) and languages often miss a few that are common elsewhere. (For instance, Dutch doesn’t have the “g” in “good” that every other language that I’m familiar with has, but strangely nobody ever has any problems with that sound.)
And languages/accents have different takes on certain sounds. So in order for someone who grew up speaking French to speak, well, any other language, they have to first be able to hear the unfamiliar sounds, then be able to produce them, and finally “reconfigure” their mouth so these sounds can follow each other naturally. If any of these are missing you’re going to have an obvious accent. It’s all much easier if the “to” accent and the “from” accent already have the same sounds.
When I finally get my license to experiment on humans, I want to take a bunch of kids and give them singing lessons with songs in different languages for a few years. I’m not going to bother teaching them the actual languages, because young kids are too dumb for that, but the singing will teach them to produce the unfamiliar sounds so when they learn a foreign language later they’ll be able to pronounce it properly.
My mother made the conscious decision to not sound like she was from Staten Island. Her sister had a very strong New Yawk accent but she has a very neutral accent. It was purposeful. The New York does bleed through on certain words but only if you are looking for it.
Her other sister spent her adult life as an Air Force spouse. Her accent changed depending on where she was living.
A cousin through marriage came over from Italy when he was 15. He is in his 70s now and he still has a not very severe but still noticeable Italian accent. It’s very pleasant.
Actors John Barrowman (Scotland) and John Mahoney (England) both purposely lost their accents. Barrowman after his father came to America for work and he was teased about his accent as a student. Mahoney after joining the Army and being teased by other soldiers.
I was born and lived in Georgia most of my life. I have lived in the Florida Keys for over 20 years. I still sound like I just came from Ga. The accent just will not go away. I am asked about it everyday.
I never thought about there being a difference between Georgia and Florida accents.
Lower-central to South Florida tends to have little to no southern accent.
North Florida does – it’s a pastiche of Georgia and Alabama, basically.
I have an ex-boyfriend who trained himself to speak with a standard middle-class London accent (not RP, not Cockney, just…regular. Estuary, maybe?). He said he couldn’t move into the kind of work he wanted sounding “like a yobbo”.
His family is working-class from Manchester. (THAT was an interesting visit. We can start with, I drink hot tea, but much lighter than they did and without milk…)
There are. Atlanta, Georgia is closer to Chicago than it is to Miami. The Florida keys are even further away than that. Not that accent is purely a function of distance but Florida is a big place with several different regions. The panhandle and northern Florida are very Southern to moderately Southern but it turns into a very different place once you get into the Miami region and into the Florida Keys.
I’m just back from about 10 days with Scottish friends (Perthshire) whom I haven’t seen in ten years.
First day: ‘Ha ha, you’ve picked up a bit of an English accent!’
By day two: ‘Thank God, you do still sound American!’
[for reference, while they were thrilled I’d married someone from Great Britain, they were disappointed that he turned out to be English and not a nice Scottish boy.]
What someone above in the zombie part of the thread said about sounding ‘off’ to native speakers when you put on a cod accent, but perfectly fine to outsiders: I suspect the ‘off’ bit is because you’ve learned to mimic certain vowel sounds or changing the stress of syllables or vocabulary distinctive to that dialect, but there is still quite a bit of syntax and turns of phrase that one would pick up after only years of immersion. Hence why the natives suss you out quickly, but the outsiders might mistake you for the genuine article.
Losing the ability to pick up new phonemes isn’t the same as losing the ability to change accents or dialects. My English accent went from “Midwestern US” (or, as my Midwestern friends put it, “not from my home town but from ‘around here’”) to a confusing Mid-Atlantic because of a couple of years in Scotland in my early 40s. The English phonemes I have problems with are the same ones now as before (I can’t pronounce /d͡ʒ/ to save my life), but other components of my accent have changed.
My elder brother emigrated to the States when he was in his mid-twenties and he acquired an American twang fairly quickly. When I was in my early thirties I had the opportunity to work in Maryland for a year or so. I didn’t like my brother’s acquired accent (which sounded contrived (though I believe it wasn’t/isn’t)), so I was quite determined to guard my own accent preciously.
It was only upon my return to the UK that I realised how much I had failed; I didn’t quite have an American accent but it wasn’t exactly English either – people would ask me if I was Canadian (LOL). That lasted a number of years.
I have lived in France now for eight years, and my daughter – who arrived here when she was 12 – has little-to-no discernible English accent to the ears of our French friends (whereas people can detect my accent from a simple “Bonjour”, perhaps it’s my bowler hat).
That’s an interesting question. I think it depends on the individual. English isn’t my mother tongue, and even though my grammar and spelling are far from perfect I’ve noticed some interesting things when it comes to my pronunciation. In Sweden we start learning English at the age of 10, which is said to be past the main window of opportunity (when one is 4-5 years old) when it comes to hard-wiring your brain into a adopting a foreign language with a native accent. However, unaware of that I decided to do my best in adopting a more native British accent. I more or less did it subconsciously, when watching TV shows and BBC News. I was also fortunate to have English teachers who, although they were Swedish had studied there and were more or less fluent in RP. Early on my foreign accent diminshed, and now I can’t remember what it actually sounded like.
An aspect which I assume to be important is also how close your original accent is to the one you wish to adopt. Although being a Swede, I’m from the south so it’s closer to Danish and much more monotonous that the “singing” Swedish accent. That has probably helped me a lot. I think I was also helped by the fact that I have good aural skills when it comes to music.
I lived in the North of Sweden in my 20s for a couple of years and when I spoke on the phone to relatives that I seldomly spoke to, they thought I had adopted a Stockholm accent, again subconsiously. I’ve also worked as a tour guide, speaking both Swedish and English and have been asked by many, if I had grown up in a bilingual home, including some Irish people. They wouldn’t believe me when I said that I neither were bilingual nor had studied in the UK, which I of course took as a compliment.
Having that said I’m a bit sceptical about the theory that it’s physiologically impossible to learn foreign accents post the window of opportunity. I simply can’t understand how it would be impossible to hear what sounds right and what doesn’t. It’s only a matter of how much time and effort you’re willing to put into it.
Since learning an RP accent I’ve also spent some time trying to learn the various regional accents and have accomplished in learning Scottish. The American accent though is, for some reason a bit harder. Even though I can hear the different sounds, when it comes to speaking it sounds like an Irish accent.
This is now a triple zombie thread.
There was a student in my HS in Philadelphia who announced when he was still in HS (according to the teacher who told me the story) that he would become a professor of mathematics in Cambridge–and did! When he was in his 70s I actually met him and his accent sounded pure Oxbridge to me, although an Englishman might have disagreed.
My brother spent two years at an Air Force base in western LA and came back with a southern accent, soon lost. But after a few minutes speaking with a southerner, it would start to come back. He would have been at least 20 when he went to LA.
My wife moved from Brooklyn to southern NJ when she was 11 and has no trace of a Brooklyn accent, although she can put it on if she wants. Our daughter now lives in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn accent seems to have disappeared, at least in her neighborhood.
I think the only safe conclusion is that people differ markedly in this regard.
I know a man whose family came to the US, from Germany, when he was about fourteen years old. He has no German accent, to my ear.
In 1986 there was a TV movie titled “The Girl Who Spelled Freedom” about a Cambodian girl whose family came to the US when she was eight years old. She didn’t know English but learned so well that she was entering and winning spelling bees. I saw her on the news once. She had an American Southern accent you could cut with a knife, since she’d learned her English in North Carolina. No stereotypical “Asian” accent at all.