Just wondered how this works out. Do the kids of British or Australian/New Zealand parents based in the US have a distinguishable difference in their accent from other US kids, or is it pure US (which can obviously vary by region)
Do you mean an accent distinguishable to outsiders, or one which might stand out in their own surroundings? It’s not a flippant question - a cousin of mine is raising a family in Utah, and although to our ears the kids are pure American, they apparently have enough of a twinge in their accent to be identifiable as different.
On the other hand, that might just be Utah…
My father was born in Britain, lived there until he was 12, and moved here, and apparently had lost all traces of his British accent by the time he was 20 (when he met my mother.) He now has a fairly pronounced Long Island accent. My cousins, however, were born over here to his brother, who still retains his British accent, and they sound as American as apple pie (well, if a California accent counts). I have several friends whose parents still have noticeable accents, none of whom have any traces of a British accent, except, oddly, when they drink.
This seems to be similar to second generation Hispanics in this country, Mom and Dad might speak accented english, but children born in this country tend to speak either entirely unaccented english, or with a creole black/white/hispanic accent common to inner-city youth (in Brooklyn, anyways).
My guess is that one’s schoolfriends end up having a much greater effect on one’s speaking habits than one’s parents.
We have an Irish family down the street with a 5 and 3 year old, and they say that both kids lost their Irish accents when they started school.
I’ve got to say that if I were in that situation, I’d hope my kids had one or the other. That trans-Pacific accent (think Greg Norman) really gets on my nerves, for some reason I can’t explain.
I’d be surprised if the accent doesn’t resurface when the kids are at home. Fluctuating accents is nothing unusual - the only time I can hear my mother’s Irish accent is when she’s on the phone to one of her sisters. At all other times, I can’t hear it, even though I try. Yet other people hear it straight away.
To the Irish parents it may sound as if the children have lost their accents. To other non-Irish people the children may still have hybrid accents, though.
A friend of mine lived in the UK for several years and married a man from Yorkshire. Their three children had accents you could cut with a knife when they first moved back to Oz. Within quite a short time, both parents thought that the children’s accents had vanished. To regular Oz folk, though, they still sounded very English.
My wife says my southern accent only comes out when I’m mad or occasionally when I’m talking to friends from back home.
I was raised in NC by parents from southern CA.
I’m pretty sure this is borne out by more serious research as well. For example, from the NY Times review of “The Nurture Assumption”:
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My father’s parents were immigrants from Hungary and never lost their accents. My father, sisters and brothers had no trace of their parents’ pronunciations or inflections, even when talking directly to them in the same room.
On the other hand, they all had recognizable Chicaguh accents all through their lives.
A friend of my son’s has AFAIK lived his entire seven years here in the US, with two British parents who have been here for about 10 years I believe. He is an only child. The boy has to my ears a definite British accent noticeable on some words.
In addition he sometimes uses common British counterparts to American words (for example, I once heard him describe someone as “cross”, a word most Americans would understand but probably wouldn’t use).
Mr Cazzle was born overseas to Australian parents. He lived in Scotland for four years, then moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma for four years, then Houston, Texas for six years. He was about 15 when the family moved back to Australia. To Australians, he has an easily detectable but mild accent, mostly American but perhaps with a slight trace of Scottish influence. It confuses people; they often ask him if he’s Canadian or Irish. On the other hand, Americans swear black and blue that he’s 100% Australian-sounding. In fact, one American told us that Mr Cazzle sounds more Australian than I do (despite the fact that I’m Australian born and bred, he thought I sounded English).
My brother-in-law (three years older) also retained an accent but the sisters were babies when they left the US - one and three years old at the time - and so have no trace of an American accent. I found it interesting that my mother-in-law came back from ten years in the US with her Australian accent apparently completely intact and unaffected while my father-in-law sounds Australian-with-a-twang.
Late last year we met a 23 year old American who has been living in this country for three years, and if I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have known that he wasn’t born here. Some people just seem to pick up accents more easily than others.
Word choice. That’s the biggest difference I’ve noticed, along with spelling. While I’ve never heard brit kids use entirely foreign words like full-stop instead of period or lorry instead of truck, the usage of words like cross for angry, pavement for sidewalk, and mate for friend does seem to be much higher. I don’t know why these usages wouldn’t be changed along with accent.
Side note - when I was a little girl, about four, my neighbours were a family with a British Dad and an American mum - the first American I had ever met. The little girl had a strong American accent, and told me that she never called her Mum “Mum” but “Lorry”. Seeing as a lot of what they did was a bit different to what I did in my family, I just accepted it, and called her mum “Lorry” too, as she asked me to. I did ask my mother and she told me something along the lines of “Well, that’s what her Mum and Dad do - different families call each other different things, she said you can call her that, so it’s OK.”
I was about twenty when I suddenly realised that my friend’s mum’s name had not been another word for “Truck”, but LAURIE!!!
My children don’t have a trace of Japanese in their English accents, but the elder one does carry over a trace of English rhythm and intonation into his Japanese, according to my husband. I can’t hear it. They are the only children in my current circle of international friends who do not have a Japanese accent when speaking their second language. Why this is, I don’t know. Maybe because they spend a huge amount of time listening to English/American stories on CD, maybe because our home language is 80% English even with their father. Maybe they just are lucky and have an ear for accents. My elder son definitely picks up stuff from what he listens to because he tends to use the long “a” sound (parse, glarse etc) whereas I am northern and say pass, glass. The younger one loves the Magic Schoolbus and just spent a month at the local International School summer program which had an American teacher and mostly American kids as the foreigners. He came back saying “You dude!” and “wait up!” which my husband finds funny and I find vaguely grating. Still, it’s their experience and their life that makes their accents, so as long as they speak clearly and understandably I don’t mind what flavour it comes out.
One thing I did notice a few years ago, and which was commented on by our group of mixed up families at the time was that our children tended to take the accents and do caricatures of them - so my English kids sound even more British than I am, the New Zealand couple had kids with an almost comic twang, and the French/American/born and raised in Japan family had a fascinating situation where the daughter had an American accent and the son had a French accent!
My father is Scottish and my Mother is Irish, I first started going to school when we lived in London and had a ‘Norf Landen’ accent till we moved to Scotland, where upon I became ‘Glaswegian’… Nowadays I have a peculiar West Cork/Glasgow/Mancunian accent (the Mancunian comes from a friend)
I have long heard that 13 is about the age when accents are fixed. So if a native German speaker moves to an English-speaking country at age 15 he or she will always have some accent while younger siblings will not. I’m sure it’s not that simple as there are some who pick up accents very quickly and others who live 60 years in a country and sound like they just stepped off the boat.
I work with a guy who has a Scottish mother, Italian father and was raised in Argentina. His accent is unique - Hispanic Scott would best sum it up.
My college girlfriend was born in Canada to two Kiwis. She then grew up in California and Texas.
Both of her parents had (and still have, I presume) thick New Zealand accents - they sounded just like Crocodile Dundee. Of this, their daughter had nothing. I did notice on occasion that she had borrowed their pronunciations for some words that I was used to hearing pronounced a different way, but I don’t suppose that’s all that unusual.
My youngest son lived in Ohio from age 14 to age 16. He was born in Australia and has lived there all his life apart from his two years in the US. He deliberately kept his Australian accent, but I teased him about his picking up American features (such as pronouncing “r” at the end of syllables), and I don’t think there’s now anything about his accent which would suggest US influence (especially given that he, like most Australians, watches a lot of US TV and movies).
My three year old was born in the US and moved to Australia when he was 10 months. I’m American and my husband is Australian. My son definitely speaks with an Australian accent, but he’ll change some words to the American pronunciation when he’s speaking to me (car instead of cah)…“Look at that cah, Daddy! Mummy, look at the car!” We’re moving back to the U.S. in two months, so I expect that both of my sons (the other is 6 mo) will end up with American accents, although I also expect that my older son will hang onto his Australian vocabulary, as that’s what my husband uses (windscreen, chips for french fries, footpath, etc.).
This is similar to my own situation: My parents are immigrants with thick Hungarian accents. My sister and I were born in the U.S. and we have American accents with no trace of Hungarian accent, even though we both grew up hearing the Hungarian accent constantly.
Ed