Between the ages of 9 and 16, I managed to lose my Philadelphia accent.
Is this the place to mention Arnold Schwarzenegger?
A man who has achieved world status in three different fields: bodybuilding , acting ,and politics.
He must have the best voice coaches in the world. But still has his Teutonic accent . Probably started too late .
I’m in the middle of writing a book where the nineteen year old narrator, Pete, lived in Canada from birth to the age of thirteen before his family moved to England. I have kept Pete’s Canadian accent.
I need advice, please, regarding his vocab; up to now I have used Canadian words and spelling: color, flavor, purse, but want to -and have hesitated- to throw in the occasional Brit word; for instance, pavement and car park rather than sidewalk and parking lot. A friend has told me yes, because Pete will have invariably picked up British words and phrases having been at school in the UK. Can I mix it? What do you think? The uncertainty is stalling the flow of writing - it’s a constant niggle. It’s so important for me to get this right!
When I’m back in the US, I use my estuary English (it’s not just accent, but you’ve also got to have vocab and syntax); in the UK, I like to annoy colleagues by reverting to the full-blooded, paint-stripper, uneducated East Bawlmer cum Delaware (not Wilmington, though, thanks) accent I had growing up.
Years of living and teaching in HE in England, though, mean that quite a bit of word choice and syntax is now fixed in British-mode, however, so even when I ‘go American’ (which actually takes some effort), the turns of phrase baffle them ones back home. It’s a fuckaroo to publish with American publishers because I need an American to proofread God’s own grammar, punctuation, and syntax out of my writing and go back to what now looks bizarre/incorrect septic phrasing and spelling.
eta or, yeah, what I said above before this zombie was resurrected yet again
Canadians usually spell those words “Colour” and “flavour.” The British spelling is preferred in Canada in the -our versus -or cases, so you might want to ensure you’re actually getting it right. (Canadians themselves are often a bit flummoxed; I have seen people insist on spelling a measuring device with “metre,” as in “speedometre,” like the unit of measure, but that is indisputably wrong.) In other instances - like tire or curb - Canadians use the American terms. Different words are usually the American choice, as in “sweater” versus “jumper,” but not always.
I’m honestly not sure how “purse” is spelled or used differently in Britain. If Pete is a guy, it’s very unlikely he’d carry a “purse,” which in Canada means a woman’s handbag.
It seems quite likely to me a 13-year-old Canadian would start to sound at least partially British after six years there. Kids are impressionable.
With adults, well, you never know. When I was a kid, the family across the street moved to Australia. We called them a few years later and the mother sounded as Canadian as she had the day she left - but the father, as well as their two little girls, were speaking in a near-incomprehensible Australian accent. (I have never in my life met an Australian who moved here that could lose their accent, so maybe there is something about that particular accent that makes it easy to pick up but hard to shake?)
My younger sister (pre-school at migration) has a native Aus accent. My younger brother has not much American accent becuse he worked, with the encouragment of his wife, on eliminating it.
My older syster has not much Amrican accent because, in her 30’s, when she came back the second time, she could hear and identify the correct Aus pronunciation.
I haven’t traveled much. My parents didn’t want me to loose my accent when I was 11 (the Aus accent sounded strange and foreign to them), and I don’t notice it to identify it now.
The chef at the club where I work is world renowned and a former executive chef for Bush (the first)…he was born and trained in France but came to the US of A when he was 22, he became a US citizen in 1977…he will be 69 this coming September. He has lost ZERO of his classic French accent.
Food for thought!
But when you’re something like a French chef, it may be in your interest to maintain that accent, if not exaggerate it somewhat.
Probably by early/mid twenties, exemplified here by future junior US senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, at 28:09 Tunnel Vision (1976) - YouTube.
I grew up in an area of Utah that has a “hick” accent, then spent 18 years in SoCal. After a short sojourn in Eastern Ohio, I landed in Jersey and have been here 10 years.
Many of my native colleagues and students have what I think of as a classic NJ/Philly accent (“water” = “worder”). The wife is a native Manhattanite and has an accent – not a Queens/Brooklyn type, but it’s there. My BFF at work is also transplanted from SoCal and we sometimes fall into ValGirlSpeak together.
Most folks say I don’t have an accent (i.e., I have the “newscaster” sound), but when I visited family last year in Utah they said I sounded funny (i.e., East Coast-y).
Reminds me of an anecdote about Henry Kissinger:
A purse is usually applied to a small bag that women use - (often kept in their handbag along with an almost inexhaustable list of other things) to keep cash in.
The other common use is the amount of money a boxer will get for a match.
Just recently turned 24 and was born and grew up in Serbia for a number of years before moving to Australia and learning English there. I never had a strong Australian accent it was a mix of Serbian and Australian I guess (a little American too? The way I said my A’s were sharp and my R’s were slightly slurred like an American accent maybe because I had an American teacher for English or something?) Who knows but now I live in New York and have been here for over 2 years consistently and now have a very strong mix of Serbian/American as an accent (I really slur my R’s now and have started pronouncing my O’s more clearly and rounded). It’s funny people here usually have no idea where I’m from (I think only one person guessed that I was from somewhere in Europe) but my Australian friends think I sound American. Some words definitely come out a little more Australian when I hang with them for a few days straight otherwise it’s foreign to me now. I also read and in my mind it’s in the American accent.
I don’t think there is an age as I don’t believe it has to do with physiology. Contrary to popular belief, people can change their accents provided they actually desire and take steps day by day to change their accent.
It’s like beauty. There are plenty of below average people who could look like supermodels with only a little correction to their teeth, proper hairstyle, posh accent and good clothing…but they don’t desire that.
My mother moved from Connecticut to Scotland in 1958 at the age of 25, and 4 years later to England. No one would guess she was an American, though it would be difficult to assign her accent to any region of the UK. My father was 28 when they moved to London and never lost his native Glaswegian accent.
This is turning into the most popular zombie thread evar!
Six years ago but I can’t let this slide. New Mexico. Los Alamos was in New Mexico, not Arizona.
As a customer service representative I would be on the phone all of the time and had fun noticing people’s accents. My dad was born in central Minnesota and lived there until he was seventeen. One woman I talked to spontaneously said she could detect “a little Minnesota”* when I spoke.
“Oh, God! I sound like Sarah Palin?”
“Oh, no; you sound brighter.”
*I, of course, have no accent at all.
It really depends on the person. My ex-wife had a good ear for accents. The only French she knew translated into “I don"t speak French” but said with a good enough accent that French people assumed she had lived there for years and wouldn’t believe her.
Me, not so much.
Recommend you see one of the films based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. My Fair Lady and the like. One of it’s subplots, is all about accents, and acquiring one, and how peoples’ lives can be shaped by how they speak.
It also goes into how if you listen to someone long enough, and you know enough about regional dialects, you can sometimes do a sort of Sherlock Holmesian routing on them, where you figure out where they’ve lived for any length of time, based on how they pronounce various words. Most people who have changed locations significantly, pick up SOME of the new vocalizations, while retaining their original locations vocalizations on others.
I myself am another of the kind who sometimes subconsciously pick up at least the cadence of the person I’m talking to. I was at the British Embassy a while back (fixing printers), and the fellow who was monitoring me suddenly asked if I was British myself, because without realizing it, I had slipped into the British “lilt,” while chatting with him. What I mean my “lilt,” is that while Americans tend to signal that a statement is a question by going up at the end of their sentence, many in Britain signal a question with a sort of swooping up and down vocalization.
I’ve pondered the fact that I do this sort of chameleon-like speaking trick a fair amount, and I’ve deduced that it’s actually a listening technique for me. You know the old idiom many use, where they say “I can’t follow you,” or "“I couldn’t follow what he was saying because his accent was so thick,” and the like? The way I experience listening is very much an almost physical “following” activity, where I have to adjust my sense of volume and pitch while I listen to someone. Once I figure out their patterns, which doesn’t take very long, I tend to follow them myself as I speak. So I start to sound a little bit like them.
I’m 63, so this isn’t something that changed with age for me, at all. I suspect that although there are variations in how brains develop which play a part for some, that there is more psychology to accent fluctuation than there is physiology. If your ego is strongly linked to how cooperative you are, for example, you are less likely to learn any new ways of speaking, because doing so would constitute “giving in” to you.
Another element, is how your vocabulary expands. Younger people SEEM to take on new accents more readily, because they are still acquiring new words every day, and learning to say the new words using the accent of the people they learn them from. Older people already HAVE most of the words they need, so they will appear to be more “immutable” or stubborn in their accents, while the real reason is simply that in both cases, the people simply speak each word in the way they originally learned it.
Another film to look at for this, is the version of the Tarzan story called Greystoke: the Legend of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes. They hired an actor to play the Ape Man who had a rather strong French-like accent, having grown up in Switzerland. To explain why he spoke that way, despite being of English origin, they had him learn English from a Belgian explorer. Very similar to something I see here in the DC area a lot, where I meet someone who is from Russia, for example, but who learned his own English from a Jamaican, and so when he speaks Russian he sounds very Russian, but when he speaks American, he says “mon” at the end of every sentence.
My grandfather came to the U.S. when he was in his 20’s, and my grandmother was even younger. They still spoke with a heavy accent 70 years later (yeah, they lived to be very, very old), even though they made a big deal about speaking English all the time.
My father-in-law still speaks with a rural northern California accent even though he’s lived in Cleveland since 1945.
I had a boss who came to the US from Germany when he was thirteen. He was in his middle fifties when I worked for him, and to my ear he had no trace of a German accent, sounded totally American.
I once saw a girl on TV, they’d made a movie about her and her family. She came to the US when she was eight years old, not knowing English… Her new home was in the South, and she had a southern accent, in English, you could cut with a knife. Total immersion did it.