I worked with a lovely lady from Talladega, Alabama, but she sounded purely Hoosier. When she went back home on vacation, though, the honeysuckle had been re-installed for a few weeks.
When I was in high school, I picked up a hint of the hill folk from my friends. My dad was furious.
My wife’s aunt and uncle lived in Harlingen, Texas for 30 years, yet they still sounded like Hoosiers.
A good friend met and married a wonderful German woman when he was stationed there in the Army. When he came home, all his sentences rose up at the end, like questions? He got over that.
My father’s first language is Spanish and he sometimes struggles with ‘chair’ and ‘share’, my mother’s first language is also Spanish, but she has no accent. My oldest sister and younger brother have no accent but my next oldesr sister married a Guatamalan and she has an accent.
Mine is, like, pure California, I mean, oh, my God!
It seems as though “accents” are dying these days. Yes, you can still pick up significant differences, but younger folks don’t seem to sound like their parents or grandparents anymore. I suppose TV has a lot to do with it, and the fact that people are moving around a lot more these days.
Specifically, I mean Southern (US) accents. I have lived in the South all of my life, and I hear some achingly beautiful dialects from older generations. Never do I hear people my age speak in such a manner. I have a pretty generic accent, though it has become increasingly Southern as I have aged.
Maybe it is different in other parts of the country, since it seems everyone is moving down here. I love listening to the different voices when I travel, but I suspect we are all beginning to sound similar as the days roll on.
It’s weird, but years of singing and getting proper diction drummed into my head has left me–your average regular Canadian who’s never visited England in her life–with a slight British tinge on her accent (I’ve had a couple of people come up and comment on it before), so I suppose I differ from my family in that way.
Also, if I’m speaking French to my mother or whoever and switch quickly back into English, I’ll have a very weak French inflection for a couple of phrases or so. But that’s nowhere near permanent.
My grandmother has a sort of soft gone-with-the-wind southern accent. My aunts and uncles on my dad’s side all have slightly different accents. My parents speak pretty standard midwestern American English.
I have one sister who speaks the same midwestern English as my parents and another who speaks with a mild St. Louis “accent.” She says “warsh” and “farty” and “drawl” and so on.
I speak with a very mild British (London) accent. It becomes more pronounced when I’m upset or angry. It’s not enough for people to say, “you’re British!” but it’s enough that people will ask where I’m from and what kind of accent it is that I have. My family lived in London when I was very young and my dad had a few British friends, so Isuppose that’s where I picked it up.
This is kind of a tangent, but one of my sisters observed recently that there’s a generational gap between accents in St. Louis period. Most of our “native” St. Louisan friends have “native” St. Louisan parents who speak with awful accents. Most of the adults I know here say “warsh,” but most of the kids don’t. I don’t know if this is just limited to our friends, neighborhood, parish, school, etc. or if it’s the same all over St Louis.
I was once told by a university friend “you’re a different class to the rest of your family” !!! (He’d answered the phone “There’s a lady on the phone for you” and was shocked when I called her Mum :smack: )
Mum, southern/upper class English but not gratingly so - she just sounds “well educated” - she was in line with her parents. My Dad’s accent pretty much matches my Mum’s but he learnt English in the south of England while his parents learnt it in Wales and so spoke with Welsh accents. My Brother also has an English accent, quite neutral but towards the well educated.
I don’t.
I echo the accents I hear around me, as a young child I had a bit of a Welsh lilt from spending time with the Welsh grandparents, then in my teens I took to shortening my vowels (“grass” not grarse", “bath” not “barth”) to sound less posh and more local (the local accent is very similar to Sean Bean); at uni in South Wales I started to pick up the intonation again … Dad used to hate it and pick me up on it. Although watered down from living abroad my accent is still not the same as the rest of the family and I quickly pick up the old influences when visiting Wales or my parents - of course being married to an Irishman only adds to the confusion!
Incidentally accent snobbism is probably my biggest ‘pet hate’.
I know two sisters from Denmark (well really I know one & met the other once). Presumably in Danish they sound the same, but my friend emigrated here & her sister went to London (UK). In English they sound completely different, which is especially odd to witness as they look similar and have a lot of the same facial expressions and body language.