So I’ve been in London for over a year now and the general consensus is that my Canadian twang has greatly dissipated.
When I went home in February for a visit everyone thought I had a full blown English accent which was cute (and incorrect!). My workmates teasingly tell me I sound far less uncivilised than when I started. I’m by no means spouting cockney but I definitely have a burgeoning British accent. Another Canuck guy who works for the same company has been here for 3 yrs and he is the oddest mix of brit/canuck: " cup 'a tea, eh?".
How long did it take you to pick up the local accent? Did you lose it when you went home? Am I doomed to be a half breed like my mate??
My kindergarten teacher was Welsh and by the first Parent Teacher meeting she was very surprised that my parents weren’t Welsh because of my accent. The one I apparently picked up from her on our half day classes.
My favorite example is that I lived in New Brunswick for a year, after that I moved to Ontario to work there for a 5 months. While driving to the West Coast after my stint in Ontario I had stopped at a dinner for breakfast. After ordering the waitress asked what part of New Brunswick I was from. She said she could tell from my accent.
I spent 18 years in BC and only 9 months in the Maritimes and guess what accent stuck :smack:
Aaaaaand since moving to Seattle, I’ve lost most of it. Some of it was on purpose, however, since, way back on my first visit, I had shopkeepers in Federal Way telling me to get the hell out of their store unless I was ready to speak “English”. It scared me a little to see the hostility directed at me because I didn’t speak like people from around here (and I honestly didn’t think it was* that * different - is it?!) and I learned very quickly to assimilate. A little depressing, but I didn’t want to get yelled at again.
It still slips out from time to time, especially when I’m talking about home or using words people around here don’t use (“dooryard”, “rubbish”, “downriver”, “fiddleheading”, “veranda”, “puckerbrush”, or “you 'magine?”) and I’ve been asked by people around here if I’m British (gah! NO! I’ll grant that the influence is there, yes, but come on). At that point I clear my throat, sit a little straighter, and say, “No. Y’all.”
So, more or less, I have “lost” most of my accent. However, I will always, always say “zed” instead of “zee”! And I don’t say “aboot”! However, I do say “a-boat”. Figure that one out. Er, wait: “Figgur that’n oat.”
Moved from south Texas to L.A., CA as a small child. Took several years, and I was in school! Never did lose it completely, I’m told. When we moved back to Texas, it mostly came back.
In my movings as an adult, I have never sounded completely like a native, no matter where I’ve lived. Or so I’m told. Even here in the OKC, people ask me where I’m from. And I’ve been here over a decade now.
I’m originally from New York City. I’ve never had a heavy Noo Yawk accent, but I have a few patterns that give me away. I’ve lived here in Texas for 20 years now, and have never picked up a Texas twang.
On the other hand, when I was a kid, we used to spend summers in Ireland, and by the end of the summer, I’d always pick up a bit of a brogue (it wouldn’t last past October, but teachers and classmates would notice!).
I have NO talent for mimicry at all. If you asked me to do an Irish accent for you, it would sound absurdly phony. But after spending some time in Ireland, it just seems to creep into my voice naturally.
I seem to have got a tinge of a British accent after nearly two years here - but I’m sure it’ll dissipate just as soon as I go back home. I find myself speaking more slowly and clearly here in England, because although I hardly have an Indian accent, it’s apparently enough to make it hard for people to understand me - and that is gradually turning into a touch of a British accent. Don’t ask me which one, it’s probably a mess of various things. I have friends who are convined that I’ve always had a British accent, and they are just confused.
I once considered going to college in the UK and called up, I believe, the University of Edinburgh. I did so without bothering to figure out the time there so, so a rather angry Scottish university guard picked up yelling “Who is it? Is it an emehrgency!???” in a very heavy, brogue* accent.
Having done impressions of British, Irish, and Scottish accents for years, and partly because he surprised the hell out of me, I started answering back with an equal accent. :smack: Just to then have that “Oh shoot, what if it’s obviously a fake accent and this is rather insulting” fear come to me, so then I got all flustered and pretty much just hung up. I didn’t try calling back the next day.
But in actual trips to the UK, I’ve never spoken anything but a straight West Coast American accent.
My accent muted when I was living in England for a couple of years in the '80s. It didn’t become a fake British accent (although I would do that once in awhile deliberately), but less of a distinctly American one, and my way of phrasing things was definitely more English. My accent changed back again after I returned to the States, although I can slip into the not-exactly British style very quickly whenever I revisit the UK or am talkng to Brits.
My English accent has always been British ‘RP’, even though I’ve spent most of my life out of England. It does get a little more sing-song when I’m in Gibraltar. Spanish, my second language, has got an undefined Latin American accent through years of travelling, working and living in Latin America, even though it started off with an Iberian Spanish (Andalucian) pronunciation. My husband, who is Dominican, never shed his Dominican accent in several years of living in Central America or Cuba. My conclusion is that the accent in your first language remains stable (unless you change countries/regions as a child, although this didn’t happen in my case) while subsequent languages are more malleable.
When my brother and I were kids our folks both worked for the Department of Defense, and the year I turned 12 (1983) we moved to England. We lived on the economy and my brother and I went to British schools: I know I picked up a Yorkshire accent pretty quick (though my brother never did), but I don’t remember exactly when it happened. My mom thinks it was after just a few months, and likes to tell the story of how she heard me talking to a friend on the phone one day and realized she couldn’t understand me. <grin> I think I just wanted to be accepted by my schoolmates, and I’ve always been the type to unconsciously start speaking like whoever’s around me.
I had a couple of American friends over there, and I would speak “normally” around them or my family, but sometimes the British accent would sneak in there even when I didn’t realize it. I remember one incident from our vacation to Tenerife in 1984: my father and brother and I were in the hotel lobby waiting for Mom to come down, and someone overheard me talking and could tell that we were from Yorkshire!
We came back to the States in 1985, and since no one wants to fit in as badly as a high school freshman I lost any trace of the British accent right away. I kept the ability to “turn it on” at will for a year or two, and can remember my mother making me “perform” for my grandparents/aunts/uncles by reading a newspaper story with a Yorkshire accent.
The last time I remember being able to have a convincing British accent was in the summer of 1992, when I was going door-to-door for an environmental group: I got bored one day, and decided it would be fun to finish my rounds with an accent. I had to talk to myself for a few minutes to get back into it, but no one who heard me could tell it was fake.
Now it’s been 21 years since we came back, and my British accent is horrible – and I can’t fake even the slightest touch of Yorkshire anymore. If I’m around a bunch of British people I’ll get a kind of hybrid accent going where it’s mostly my speech pattern that changes, but I try to control it because I’d never want anyone to think I was making fun of how they talk (or trying to be a poseur).
So there are no traces left in my speech, but sometimes my writing still has a tiny bit of an accent: I spell some words “-our” instead of “-or” (like neighbour), and some words end in “-re” instead of “-er” (like theatre). And I was pleased to watch a few episodes of Footballer’s Wive$ the other day and realize that I still understand all of the slang.
I think the Kiwi accent is possibly the easiest to pick up. I did it a bit just by working with a couple of New Zealanders. I think it takes less effort to speak like a Kiwi than like an Australian (you just cut the vowels back a bit and you’re on your way), and as I’m inherently lazy, that was good enough for me.
It’s generally accepted that as far as Australian regional accents go (and it’s so marginal compared to many other places that some people refuse to believe they exist), the Sydney accent has become slightly Kiwified.
I’m from London, but my university is in Coventry, so I seem to have picked up a slight bit of a Midlands accent. Not noticeable to me, but definetly to others when I come back. Apperently i’m good at faking accents, though; supposedly my french is dead-on south of France. Now, if only I could remember the words…
When I was living in Germany, I quickly got rid of my American accent when speaking German. It helped that I perfected my German in a working class section of Berlin. I knew a few Americans who spoke German far better (grammatically) than I did, but they could never shake that American twang and people would always ask, “what part of the States are you from.” One girl I knew from Alabama sounded like Miss Scarlet speaking German…quite funny to hear.
I must have done a good job as often Germans thought I was lying when I said I was an American and I would actually have to show them my passport before they would believe me.
Then there are those Americans who will visit London for a week and come back to the States with the most godawful, fake British accent, “Pip pip, tally ho old boy…” and think they are fooling people.
I think I have everybody beat. I talked to my boss’s spouse, a transplanted Brit, for **about 20 minutes ** one day. Immediately after that I called another person in the office, got her British secretary, and said secretary said, “Oh, how long have you been over here?” She went on to say she could always tell a fellow Brit even when they thought they had picked up the local accent.
Sorry…I’m from California.
Actually this is very embarrassing. I do not know I’m doing it, can’t hear it in my own voice, and can’t do it on purpose. I think I do it with mannerisms, too.
I used to speak French reasonably fluently. It now takes me a couple of weeks to regain the standard, but after that couple of weeks, people tend to think I’m German. This is not good.
I grew up with a very thick East Texas accent even though I grew up just across the border in Louisiana. I started losing my accent as soon as I went college and it was about 90% faded at the end of it. I later moved to the Boston area and I am down to about 95% loss (no, no one in family has a Boston accent :shudder:). People often pick up that I am not from the area because most of the wealthier suburbs have that generic American accent with some twinge but it isn’t that often that someone listens to me and knows that I am from the Deep South right away. It wasn’t a conscience process that caused me to lose it and I would love to have some of my old accent back.
I wish my bastarding accent would leave me but it buggering wont!
I used to pick up accents as a child but now i cant. Arses. I’ve lived in Scotland for nearly eight months and was tonight (can you tell I’ve just got in from the pub?) reminded that i was memorable around the SU for my posh English accent and something else I’m not going to tell about.
