Marylander here. My aunt Linda has always spoken with a distinct southern accent. Oddly, she is the only one of in the family to have acquired this trait. It is never forced nor done for effect, -just the way she has managed to go through life expressing herself.
My roommate in college, Kevin (maybe this is just a Maryland thing) also spoke with a thick hillbilly accent. When I finally got around to meeting his family, I was surprised to hear that the rest of them did not.
Over the years my wife and I have managed to stamp out any identifiable accents in our speech. Sometimes I sound Southern, sometimes she sounds Californian, sometimes we both sound Midwestern, etc.
Our daughter, on the other hand, has an accent so clearly identifiable as “hometown” that it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.
Children get their dialect from their speech community, which is not usually their parents. So one generation could easily speak differently from another. I have never heard of individual siblings with different accents, though, unless they picked them up later in life.
My mother’s from Texas, my father’s from France, I was raised in Boston.
Fortunately, they all seemed to cancel each other out (listening to a lot of Monty Python helped, I think) rather than leaving me with the accent from hell.
My family is from Indianapolis in my parents’ generation. The lines between the Northern U.S. dialect and the Central U.S. dialect (the twangy one that a lot of Northerners mistake for “Southern”), are both represented in that area. My Dad’s older brother had the same modified “Northern” accent as the rest of the family, but married a woman with a decided “Central twang.” Of their three sons, the oldest and youngest spoke with the Northern accent while the middle son spoke with the Central. (They range in age from 20 to nine years older than I am, so I have no idea how they sounded growing up. The two older men are fairly close in age, however, so it does not appear to be a matter of “spacing.”)
My mother sounds pretty “Long Island,” while I’ve got what’s been described as a more generic American accent. [I hated the local accent and made sure I didn’t pick it up; I was born in Manhattan and lived in Queens until age 5.] And because he speaks awkwardly and had a speech impediment growing up - it’s mostly gone - people sometimes mistake one of my brothers for Russian or British. I get the sense those people don’t know what Russian or British people sound like, but still.
My grandmother is french, and has a thick Acadian accent to go with it. My mother’s father’s parents were Irish. My mother sounds like neither of them.
My father speaks with no discernable accent, and my mother, though she reverts to her local slang more often than he does, more or less speaks like him now. My younger brother and I, however, sound exactly the same, but neither of us sound like our parents.
People who attended a different school on the other side of town, but are the same approximate ages as us, have a slightly different accent. People from Saint John (an hour away from where I grew up) have a totally different accent.
reiterating what **saoirse ** said. Children do not inherit accents from parents. Accents are entirely peer driven, so different accents in a family is common. I have also known siblings to have totally different accents as well. A friend of mine is the only child in her family without a Boston accent. No accent whatsoever. Her brother and sister have thick accents. There’s no particular reason for it, except that she ran with a different crowd in school.
My dad speaks English with a slight NY accent and Hebrew with an American accent.
My mom speaks English with a slight South Jersey accent and a Hebrew with a heavy American accent.
My brother and sister speak English with Israeli accents and accentless Hebrew.
I speak English with a “neutral” accent (people place me vaguely in the Tri-State Area, but with no regionalisms), and Hebrew with a very slight American accent.
My SIL’s father and uncle’s family fled Austria in 1939, when they were fairly young, like young teenagers or so. Oddly enough, her father, the older brother had no discernible accent while the younger one has a very definite Austrian accent. Perhaps it’s because the older brother spent his life in real estate, which must have meant lots of meetings and sales calls, while the younger was an (aero?) engineer who probably did a lot of work with less conversation and interaction.
My father speaks English with a heavy Singaporean (or Fukkian Chinese) accent, Mandarin with strange Cantonese/Fukkianese intonations and terms; his Cantonese sounds like that of a mainlander, and apparently his Hakka sounds a lot like his Teochew. He stumbles with his Indonesian and sounds like he has a mild speech impediment.
My mother speaks English with a heavy Mandarin accent, and Mandarin with an Indonesian accent, lightly garnished with some Singaporean (lah, leh) and Cantonese (wei, wah, and pok gai). She’s a native speaker of Bahasa Indonesia and Javanese.
My English is pretty much Californian (TV, school), though I sometimes do RP (attracts less attention in the UK) and revert to Singlish when speaking to Singaporean relatives and friends. My Mandarin is of the Taiwanese flavor (TV again), my Cantonese is anglicized to the point where locals can tell I went to an international school, and my French is Canadian (school). My Javanese, apparently, is native-level, but in Bahasa I sound like a country bumpkin because the Javanese just spills out.
No one’s visited at my place before who could understand much of the intra-familial discourse, since we mix everything together. It’s only gotten worse since my sister and brother began taking French in school.
My father speaks English with a heavy Singaporean (or Fukkian Chinese) accent, Mandarin with strange Cantonese/Fukkianese intonations and terms; his Cantonese sounds like that of a mainlander, and apparently his Hakka sounds a lot like his Teochew. He stumbles with his Indonesian and sounds like he has a mild speech impediment.
My mother speaks English with a heavy Mandarin accent, and Mandarin with an Indonesian accent, lightly garnished with some Singaporean (lah, leh) and Cantonese (wei, wah, and pok gai). She’s a native speaker of Bahasa Indonesia and Javanese.
My English is pretty much Californian (TV, school), though I sometimes do RP (attracts less attention in the UK) and revert to Singlish when speaking to Singaporean relatives and friends. My Mandarin is of the Taiwanese flavor (TV again), my Cantonese is anglicized to the point where locals can tell I went to an international school, and my French is Canadian (school). My Javanese, apparently, is native-level, but in Bahasa I sound like a country bumpkin because the Javanese just spills out.
No one’s visited at my place before who could understand much of the intra-familial discourse, since we mix everything together in about equal parts. It’s only gotten worse since my sister and brother began taking French in school.
Every kid (well, we’re all adults now) in my family has a different accent. One brother picked up a Chicago accent when he moved from PA to Illinois. Another who stayed in PA has the typical central PA “accent” (much less discernible than other regional accents). Another who now lives in Florida still retains a bit of the PA accent. I never had much of that speech pattern - my guess is that years of high-school French, plus choir involving a lot of Latin, clobbered that. I did develop some Southern speech habits through living in in NC for many years but I don’t think my accent is identifiably from any part of the country.
My spouse, Typo Knig is from northern New Jersey. Everyone in his family has a strong NJ/NY Metropolitan Area accent. Except him. He’s got the most “generic” accent I have ever heard. No discernible regional accent whatsoever. I expect it’s because he went to a boarding school with boys from, literally, all over North and South America.
My entire family is from California. After four years in the Midwest, though, I occasionally (it goes back and forth, depending on my mood and who I’m talking to) pronounce some random words with a decidedly Midwestern accent. My dad thinks it’s hysterical when I call him “DEEyad”.
OTOH, my friends in Chicago think my California accent is hilarious. A former coworker used to mimick my CA Rising all the time. I guess it depends on your point of view.
My aunt and uncle (both Americans) lived in London for a number of years, and their three children were all born there. They moved back to the US when their kids were 12, 8, and 5. My aunt and uncle had picked up slight English accents in their time, but their kids sounded, well, like they were born in London. That was, oh, nineteen or twenty years ago now, and my cousins sound pretty much American now, but the older two still have decidedly British hints to their accents (and diction) that make them sound noticeably different from their parents and younger brother. (My eldest cousin was, for years and years “the English girl”; when she finally lost her accent altogether, she moved back to London for a few years and immediately became “the American girl”. She just can’t win.)
My wife’s brother speaks with a very noticeable Philadelphia accent, the only one of four siblings who does. This is surely the result of the “tough guy” crowd he ran with when he was younger.
My Malaysian-born Australian husband and his Australian-born brother both have accents that are clearly influenced by the decade they lived in America (although to Americans, they sound Australian). Their younger sisters have 100% Australian accents, even though both were born in America and have dual citizenship. Their half-brother has a strong Scottish accent (I’m not sure if he was born in the US or in the Phillipines but has lived in Scotland for most of his life now) and their Scottish-born half-sister has a hybrid Scottish-American accent thanks to her years at the American International School in India. They’ve only all been together once in their lives, and they made an odd group that ranged in age from 7 to 30, with a variety of skintones, accents and appearances.
I grew up with 4 siblings on military bases around the US. We all had a “TV announcer” accent when I went to college in Richmond. I went to visit in North Dakota 1 year later and both teen girls had acquired NoDak accents, while the teen boys hadn’t bothered.
My adult niece has only been in Hawaii for 5 years and I can barely understand her on the phone these days, she speaks such a thick combination of Colorado Valley Girl and Hawaiian Islander.