How do you develop an accent?

NaidaUP

NaidaUP

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My friend moved from the UK to Canada earlier this year with a young child and have given birth to another, not long ago in Canada.

They are all British and the mom is deaf.

What I'm wondering about is whether the child that was born in Canada will gain a Candian accent or as the child is around family with British accents, the child won't develop a Candian accent, anyone knows how to works?
 
Isn't accents- one is brought up as a young kid from "hearing the family speak and all their playmates"?
Not exactly a "conscious activity".
 
They'll take on the speech habits that are the most convenient.
In this case, it'll be the Canadian accent.
 
I have several deaf friends that grew up in the Boston suburbs, they all have that "Bawstin" accent. People tell me that I have that distinctive Upstate NY way of pronouncing words, which is where I was from.

Everyone learns how to speak in the manner that they are taught.
 
They'll end up with British accents, but probably not as strong as the rest of the family. You get an accent by repeating the sounds you hear while you're learning to talk. Who is this child going to be hearing? The family, who have British accents.

One of my son's friends parents are British, he was born in the US, he has a British accent. If a hearing child has 2 deaf parents, they can end up with a deaf accent.
 
When I was 3-1/2 years old we moved from California to England. Been living there for the next 6 years, I have developed British accent, and spending lot of time with our house keeper. Then we moved to Biloxi, MS, It's one of my biggest culture shock for me and they all laughed at my accents. My parents are US born but I mostly spent lot of time with outside of my family home and my house keeper. So, it's all depending on family lifestyle and how children are being exposed the most. Today many people still recognized my British accent and some accent will never changed. The most famous one is "Vase" I pronounce "Vawse" or "Vahz" and here in US usually says "veys" or vaaayse. There are many other words that are long gone, I usually say...let look under the bonnet, but here usually say "hood". So thing changed over time.
 
Both my parents have a very heavy Irish accent. To this day my hubby has a hard time understanding my mom. All seven of us kids never picked up their accent. I always wondered why we did not.
 
Angel1989 said:
Both my parents have a very heavy Irish accent. To this day my hubby has a hard time understanding my mom. All seven of us kids never picked up their accent. I always wondered why we did not.
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That is weird!! My parents are both Southern, I had a Southern accent for most of my childhood. My dad was in the Air Force though and we moved around a lot, I lost it along the way, although it does sneak back in if I'm really tired or drunk I'm told.
 
Angel1989 said:
Both my parents have a very heavy Irish accent. To this day my hubby has a hard time understanding my mom. All seven of us kids never picked up their accent. I always wondered why we did not.
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It may be because your teachers and classmates did not also have that accent. Kids want to fit in, and they are quick to pick up a new accent so they don't "stand out".
 
shimo said:
It may be because your teachers and classmates did not also have that accent. Kids want to fit in, and they are quick to pick up a new accent so they don't "stand out".
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Kids generally learn to talk before they go to school though.
 
Language is a continuous work in progress, and it is not unusual for people, especially kids, to follow how their peers talk in order to fit in, even if they're not in the initial language acquisition stage (1-6) or secondary language acquisition window (12-15).

There might be a few words the kid says in a British accent, but most words are going to be in the same style as place the kid is living in.

The thing with mastering a language and learning new words is that you need to be able to hear the same word or phrase from several different sources before it can be reproduced.

If the parents are the only ones using a certain word ("lorry" instead of truck) or saying it a certain way ("Machoo" instead of "mah-chure"; "po-kit" instead of "paw-ket") the kid will not use that word.


I wouldn't be surprised if, and would even expect, the kid has no british accent except for a few dozen words by the end of high school.
 
But there's a difference between losing an accent along the way and never having it in the first place ;)
 
ambrosia said:
They'll end up with British accents, but probably not as strong as the rest of the family. You get an accent by repeating the sounds you hear while you're learning to talk. Who is this child going to be hearing? The family, who have British accents.

One of my son's friends parents are British, he was born in the US, he has a British accent. If a hearing child has 2 deaf parents, they can end up with a deaf accent.
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I have many examples that go against that... when I was little, a family from the UK with two young boys (about age 7) moved in across the street from us. The boys had extremely thick accents when they first arrived but by puberty you'd hardly be able to tell they weren't Canadians born and bred.

My mother was born to a Scottish mother and a Polish father. She was raised in the UK until the age of 7 and then moved to Canada. She sounds Canadian too.

I would note that while the kids will spend time talking to their family, they'll also spend a lot of time talking to their friends and people in the community in general. Further, if you have an out of place accent then people will constantly pester you and a child will likely try to suppress it in order to fit in with everyone else.
 
ambrosia said:
But there's a difference between losing an accent along the way and never having it in the first place ;)
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There's not much of a difference if you are too young to remember ever using the other accent. Then it's just like never having learnt it in the first place. :shock:

I know lots of second-generation Koreans like that. They have videos of themselves talking full Korean when they're 5 or 6, but at 26 they only know English, because once they started going to school, the Korean became useless.
 
metalangel said:
I have many examples that go against that... when I was little, a family from the UK with two young boys (about age 7) moved in across the street from us. The boys had extremely thick accents when they first arrived but by puberty you'd hardly be able to tell they weren't Canadians born and bred.

My mother was born to a Scottish mother and a Polish father. She was raised in the UK until the age of 7 and then moved to Canada. She sounds Canadian too.

I would note that while the kids will spend time talking to their family, they'll also spend a lot of time talking to their friends and people in the community in general. Further, if you have an out of place accent then people will constantly pester you and a child will likely try to suppress it in order to fit in with everyone else.
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:shock: I didn't say they'd have the accent forever, I even made a post about how I lost my own Southern accent when I was young. when a child is 2 or 3 they're not going to be doing a whole lot of socializing outside the home, so yeah when they're learning to talk they're going to gain the accent of whatever they hear the most. Doesn't mean that won't change later.
 
shimo said:
There's not much of a difference if you are too young to remember ever using the other accent. Then it's just like never having learnt it in the first place. :shock:

I know lots of second-generation Koreans like that. They have videos of themselves talking full Korean when they're 5 or 6, but at 26 they only know English, because once they started going to school, the Korean became useless.
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Angel said neither her or 6 siblings ever had one, unless they were all born at the same time the older ones are going to remember if the younger ones had accents even if the older ones don't remember if they themselves had one. Hell I remember when I had one.
 
ambrosia said:
:shock: I didn't say they'd have the accent forever, I even made a post about how I lost my own Southern accent when I was young. when a child is 2 or 3 they're not going to be doing a whole lot of socializing outside the home, so yeah when they're learning to talk they're going to gain the accent of whatever they hear the most. Doesn't mean that won't change later.
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That's not what you said in the post I quoted, and then you said how it was weird that kids with very Irish parents didn't sound Irish. Then you countered your comment about losing your Southern accent in your next post by saying kids learn to talk before they go to school, implying that your initial comment was in fact what was correct (you can see why I'm confused!)

Shimo is right, though a specific word (lorry vs truck) is not a question of accent so much as vocabulary choice. Lorry is slowly dying out as a term used in the UK in my experience.
 
No we were not born at the same time, but very, very close:) a lot of cold nights in Ireland I guess:) The first 4 kids were born in Ireland then me, my brother and sister followed. About a year or a little more in between each or us. I think if anyone would pick up the Irish accent it would have been me. Having both parents and four siblings, though they were all young, under 6 when I came along.

I never really thought about it until this post. Maybe I just don't remember but I never had a teacher correct my English. My mom still says "tree for the #3)

They babysat my girls while I worked and neither of my girls pronounced words with the accent either.

I will tell you this though...I would love to hear that Irish accent again, now I am totally deaf.
 
When I took two years German in high school, it was taught by a native German speaker. I picked up some of her ways of speaking, but lost it later.

When I visited a girlfriend in Virginia and stayed with her family for a week, I started picking up some of the Southern ways of speaking.

Don't ask me why. Maybe I'm just paying close attention to how people say things. lol
 
DeafBadger said:
When I took two years German in high school, it was taught by a native German speaker. I picked up some of her ways of speaking, but lost it later.

When I visited a girlfriend in Virginia and stayed with her family for a week, I started picking up some of the Southern ways of speaking.

Don't ask me why. Maybe I'm just paying close attention to how people say things. lol
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I lived in the UK for 14 years... I didn't really pick up the accent so much as use the correct terms for people to understand me. My gf claims I became 'more Canadian sounding' every time I visited home but it wasn't so much the accent changing as I stopped suppressing it. I was just sick of the stupid questions people constantly asked me when they heard me.

I remember being five and visiting my grandmother in London, she worked a at a school and so took me to the school Christmas party, all the kids were demanding I say things to hear what it sounded like. Very upsetting.
 
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