Re American immigrants, by the 2nd or 3rd generation are they any discernible differences in the way people sound while talking conversationally based on the way their grandparents or parents spoke, or are all ethnic accents blended out or otherwise vanished by that point?
I should be clear here I’m talking about any portion of an accent related to speaking a foreign language, not regional accents due to physical location in the US.
Not the US, but my Uncle emigrated to Australia from the UK. he never lost his Lancashire accent and his two kids born in Australia, with an Aussie mother, who have visited England all of once, still had a noticeable (to me) trace of his regional accent.
Interestingly, one of them actually sounded more English than his much older half-sister, who had emigrated along with her Dad age 15.
I’ve also met two teenagers born in New Zealand who had a distinct German accent, acquired from their parents- again, they’d only visited Germany once or twice.
So, yeah, at least for 2nd generation, sometimes. Like everything with accents though, it depends on the person.
Anecdote:
2nd Generation Chinese.
No one has ever said anything about me having an accent.
I pretty much don’t speak Cantonese either though.
Depends. I have no trace of Italian in my speach but I know people who grew up in Chinatown, went to Chinese speaking schools and rarely left the neighborhood. Id say they have some accent.
How can this be a GQ? I’d say it varies.
The mouth has hundreds of muscles. Some languages use many, some use less. Accents occur when the muscles haven’t been used and are no longer viable, and can no longer pronounce the sound for other languages. In this respect, children can learn languages without an accent, because the muscles are available. But there is nothing wrong with accents. They are beautiful. The main thing is the speaker is understood.
I think it depends on the critical mass of other speakers around. If you take a given family from any other country and plop them in the U.S. among all other groups, then I doubt language influences of the homeland will last long into the second generation. However, the influence can last much longer if there are enough to form a community that that reinforces certain speaking patterns.
I work in a facility in Massachusetts that is staffed almost completely by Portuguese immigrants and their families. It goes down to at least three generations so far and they all speak English but also all speak Portuguese fluently even though most of the younger ones have never been there at all. The same thing is true for lost of ethic communities around the country especially Hispanic ones.
Yeah, pretty much this. Both my grandparents and my wife’s grandparents were immigrants. As that was an era that emphasized assimilation, they emphasized learning English, made sure they spoke English at home, etc. Consequently our parents, aunts and uncles spoke with nothing other than a regional accent.
Take a tightly knit immigrant community where the native language continues to be spoken, however, and the speech patterns will continue far longer.
Those that grew up with something else as their first language usually have what I’d call the American bilingual accent for whatever it is. There’s a fairly recognizable accent that a lot of 2nd-3rd generation bilingual Hispanic people in Texas have, and there’s another that 2nd-3rd generation bilingual Vietnamese people have as well in my experience.
I think it has to do with how they learned language and letter sounds more than anything.
However, I do know both Hispanic and Vietnamese folks who grew up with English as their first language, and with English only spoken in the home (by heavily accented parents), and if you can’t see them, you wouldn’t know that they’re ethnic at all.
Is this your opinion or is this a widely accepted theory? I’ve never head this claim before
My mum is a first generation Canadian. She sounds Canadian. Her mum had a distinct accent.
My dad is a second generation Canadian, he too talks like the average person here.
In my dads family, his older sister failed first grade because she didn’t speak English(despite being born in Canada). She sounds Canadian.
After she failed, my paternal grandparents banned German conversation from the home. Grandma sounds Canadian to me, and so did grandpa.
No, it is not my opinion. My opinions are more profound. I am an English teacher in a foreign country, and I head [sic] this claim from my instructors. Sorry, nothing to cite.
Often by the first, most commonly those who inmigrated before 30 or so. I’ve met many first generation immigrants that you could tell were so only if you heard them speaking with someone who shared their first language; the rest of the time there’s no recognizably foreign accent or grammar.
This refers to English in the US and to several languages in Spain.
I’m a little confused as to the question. You’re talking about people born in America to immigrant parents? Because I know a lot of people born to immigrant parents (including my grandmother), and I’ve never known any to to have an accent other than an American one.
Anecdotally, the age at which you get to keep your accent is around 10-12. If you moved somewhere before that age and get regular verbal practice with natives, you’ve got no accent. If after- you do.
(Based on personal experience and the experience of of the handful of other immigrant kids 've known.)
Yes, for example I have two cousins who were born in Hungary and moved to the US before age 6. They are adults now, and they both speak English with no trace of an accent, though their parents have very thick accents.
I’ve known a couple. They were born in the US but lived in an very ethnic area , the sort where it’s easy to get by without speaking English. They spoke English only in school growing up , and spoke to family, friends, store employees , etc in their native language.
There are two separate issues here. The first question is if the children of immigrants speak English like other Americans. Yup. Steven Pinker talks about this in The Language Instinct, and how kid’s pronunciation doesn’t depend on their parents. They pick it up from their surroundings, and unless they are completely surrounded by second generation immigrants, they will speak unaccented English.
The other is if they will speak the parents’ language and that’s another issue.