Just chiming in to say that what **harmonicamoon **is saying is nonsense. First, there aren’t hundreds of muscles in the mouth. second not all the muscles that are in the mouth have anything to do with speech production, and third, most importantly, there’s no muscular atrophy (nonviability?) to speak of in response to not learning particular sounds.
First, let’s define what we mean by “1st,” “2nd,” “3rd generation.” For some people, the first generation is the immigrants (first generation to live here), which is how I think of it. For others, the first generation is the immigrants’ children (first generation to be born here). I’m not sure which meaning you had in mind. Which ordinal system is being used bears directly on your OP question.
American here. I’ve never, to my knowledge, had trouble distinguishing an Irish from a Scottish accent, but I have mistaken English (from England) accents for Australian on more than one occasion.
Oh, that’s no good.
There are still Yiddish speaking enclaves in NY, such as Kiryas Joel. A similar thing happened to Yiddish that happened to Pennsylvania Dutch (which is a dialect of German). The languages were once widely spoken as a community language and now they are languages associated with insular religious fundamentalists who retain the language as a sign of non-assimilation. Apparently Pennsylvania Dutch was not just widely spoken in PA, the language was spoken as far south as Northern Virginia.
OK. I get that. But these kids were attending* Christian* high school. Probably not a sign of extreme attempts to resist assimilation.
I never knew that about Loudoun. That is so amazing. I live in Fairfax but have been focusing on the early history of Loudoun and points west. Thanks!
I wonder if **harmonicamoon ** is misremembering something I remember reading. Not that the muscles in the mouth atrophy, but that as we age, we lose the ability to distinguish and therefore replicate sounds that aren’t used in the language(s) we hear frequently.
Not when you knew them anyway. But I’m sure that some small number of people leave Kiryas Joel and other such communities.
Not data, but anecdote. My paternal grandfather immigrated from Poland at the age of 2 in 1905. He was an only child whose family moved several times before finally settling in Indiana. Assimilation was seen by his family as the ticket to the American Dream. He spoke with a midwestern accent.
My paternal grandmother, OTH, was born “fancy Dutch” in PA before moving to a heavily German / PA Dutch part of Indiana. She spoke with a slight German accent punctuated with a select few German words. Although I don’t speak German myself, my WAG is that her accent in that language was PA Dutch.
The loss of ability to make certain words happens in the brain, not in the mouth. Babies are universal linguists, meaning that babies can make every sound in every language. As they grow older, the brain loses this ability and can only hear and make sounds in the languages they hear. The most famous example in america is the inability of some asian cultures to distinguish between the L and the R sounds.
A person’s accent is determined by the age at which they acquire the new language. before age 13 people will speak the new language with no accent. After age 16 they will speak with an accent, and between some varying amount of accent.
It is possible for a person to train and lose almost of their accent as an adult, but it must be conscious training.
In my hometown, there’s still very distinct “ethnolects” spoken by the great grandchildren of immigrants that originally settled there. It’s most prominent among Italian-Americans, whose variant of the Inland Northern/Northern Cities Vowel Shift accent sounds “tough” and “swaggery”, for lack of better terms. The old Polish-American accent isn’t as strong as it used to be, but it’s still quite evident; “Dose Bills der aren’t playing dat well der”.
This is what I was talking about- but you worded it better