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    Your accent

    Has your accent changed over the years? Do you speak with the same accent as your parents? Do your children speak with the same accent as you?

    #2
    Your accent

    Yes.
    No.
    n/a

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      #3
      Your accent

      Same. Though not as much as my brother, who went from full American accent at age 7 to full British (home counties) at age 9.

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        #4
        Your accent

        I've lived in the capital for almost three decades now, so family and old acquaintances telling me that I sound 'more London' than my younger version hardly comes as a surprise. My two daughters sound nothing like me, which is also unsurprising given that a) they're female and b) they have Welsh and Scottish mothers.

        As regards my parents (who have both passed on), their accents used to alter during 'phone calls: my mother went Welsh with her relatives, while my dad used to adopt a mid-Atlantic accent when discussing business with his US colleagues. When public speaking (or on the radio, etc), I sound very like the old man these days. My sister still enjoys my impressions of him - well, it's a link to the past, isn't it?

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          #5
          Your accent

          1. Yes, hugely
          2. Not hugely different.
          3. No

          first q: I grew up in Leeds and went to state schools, so with the usual chameleon-like properties of children I conformed to the broad Leeds accent of my classmates, much broader than that of my parents, who had similar childhoods but were then university-educated and moved much closer to "received pronunciation". Now I'm a thoroughly middle class southerner, save for my short "a"s.

          second q: My accent has ended up rather closer to RP than my parents (who lived in Leeds all their working lives), but there's not a vast gap. Neither my parents nor I in adult life have ever had, for example, that Yorkshire dialect short "u" that's so flat it's phonemically and phonetically identical to the "oo", e.g. pronouncing "book" and "buck" or "put" and "putt" identically.

          third q: no way! My daughters have all been born and brought up in the SE of England, so have the RP long "a" in "ask", "dance", "glass" etc. Like many thoroughly middle class and/or southwards-relocated northerners I find the northern short "a" is something that never leaves you. The only thing is, my 5 year old is currently copying my short "a"s as a deliberate whim, which is lovely of her but unlikely to last long.

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            #6
            Your accent

            But is there anyone whose accent hasn't noticeably changed, but their dialect has?

            (e.g. changing speech patterns, using local coinage of words and grammar, etc.?)

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              #7
              Your accent

              Eh up bro, back at ye laters on thon.

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                #8
                Your accent

                It can't be that rare for people to stop using dialect words of their youth if they marry outside the dialect area and move away from it.

                I often make a point, for the sake of nostalgia and pride in my origins, of saying "beck" for "brook" and "ginnel" for "alleyway", but it was only on seeing the word on a dialect map online recently that I suddenly remembered how we called splinters "spells" when I was growing up - hadn't used or heard the word for over 30 years.

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                  #9
                  Your accent

                  Well, as you move away changing your dialect becomes a necessity. If no one around you understands you, you might as well talk to yourself.

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                    #10
                    Your accent

                    aye, ah'm just about thraiped wi' it.

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                      #11
                      Your accent

                      Moved to Sheffield 15 years ago now. Neither my Lestah accent or my wife's Lahdahn accents have changed - locals know that we are foreigners, but when we return back to our respective cities, no-one comments that our accents have changed.

                      Parents live in Leicester; Mum born & bred, Dad from York. Both have retained their accents even though Dad has lived down south as he puts it, for some 57 years now. When he visits his brother who still lives in York, their accents are identical.

                      Both of the girls accents have changed; especially the youngest who has a right proper Yorkshire accent after moving up here aged 8 with us. My Dad is proud of her, see above.

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                        #12
                        Your accent

                        my dad used to adopt a mid-Atlantic accent when discussing business with his US colleagues. When public speaking (or on the radio, etc), I sound very like the old man these days. My sister still enjoys my impressions of him - well, it's a link to the past, isn't it?
                        haha - my dad did the same thing, adopting a ludicrous brit accent when talking to his english colleagues on the phone. only in my family it's my sister who does the funny impression.

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                          #13
                          Your accent

                          My accent is almost universally described as 'posh' when I first speak to people. My counter is that I have a regional accent, the region just happens to be the Sussex/Surrey borders. But I lived in Hull until I was 15, and when we moved down to Sussex everybody thought I was Scottish. there's not a trace of East Yorkshire left, except for the word bastard which sounds better in northern.

                          My father is a born-and-bred Yorkshireman and although he hasn't lived there for 30 years he still sounds like Harry Enfield's George Integrity Whitebread, but even more so.

                          My eldest (24) does that mockney thing with her peers, but not when she's talking to proper grown-ups. My youngest (4) is picking up elements of his surroundings (South Oxfordshire) most noticeably when counting (foyve, noyne etc).

                          I also have two teenage boys who both apparently grew up in Jamaica.

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                            #14
                            Your accent

                            My parents each spoke other languages at home as children, and my mother was always described as having a "foreign" accent in English, though I was never able to hear it. She, on the other hand, was very concerned that my brother and I not sound like the New Yawkers we lived among, and we don't (though I can do a reasonable good impression if asked, particularly if I've been drinking).

                            I'm also one of those people who unconsciously modifies my accent depending on the people I'm speaking with. This is a useful trait when learning and speaking foreign languages, but can tick people off if one isn't careful (a uni roommate from Savannah was convinced that I was mocking him purposely). It also seems to be a reasonably common trait at Ivy League universities.

                            My time working in Europe has also taught me that a "mid Atlantic" accent leaning towards the UK side is generally better understood by Europeans than any US accent (or even US newsreader speak, which is supposed to be unaccented, but isn't).

                            ursus minor tends to sound more American than I do, which is interesting for someone who grew up in Europe and attended British schools for almost a decade.

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                              #15
                              Your accent

                              I hate my accent. I describe the local accent (Farnham/Aldershot) and us people who have it as 'cockney wurzels'. It just makes me/us sound really thick.

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                                #16
                                Your accent

                                As far as I hear myself I'm flat dublin though some foreign customers have asked me where I'm from cause they didn't think I had a dublin accent, mother was dublin born and bred though to me she had a soft accent, step dad had a thick cork accent

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                                  #17
                                  Your accent

                                  Your Usual Table wrote:
                                  Originally posted by andrew7610
                                  I also have two teenage boys who both apparently grew up in Jamaica.
                                  This is something that's interested me for a while. I have absolutely no evidence to back this up but it seems to me that Jamaican pronunciation is permeating the UK to different degrees, notably the pronunciation of the word "whatever."...
                                  Well, you say this, but... The version of a black Caribbean accent that English kids are adopting is one that is filtered through U.S. (largely R&B) culture, even if it's second generation.

                                  But... in my last job, the uber-boss there had the weirdest accent. I couldn't work it out for ages. At first, I thought it was Geordie, but every so often something would sound a bit 'wrong'. I wondered if it was a Sunderland or Middlesborough accent, as I'm unfamilar with subtle differences that might exist between them. In the end, though, I asked a colleague where he came from because of this accent (I was new to the role and didn't know him well enough to ask him directly, you see.) The colleague laughed and explained to me that everyone thought he was Geordie, but he was, in fact, just white Jamaican. When I next listened to him talking, I could indeed pick up hints of that. It was the strangest thing!

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                                    #18
                                    Your accent

                                    evilC wrote: Well, you say this, but... The version of a black Caribbean accent that English kids are adopting is one that is filtered through U.S. (largely R&B) culture, even if it's second generation.
                                    I think you're right about the source of it, but they don't seem to have any direct Americanisms which I'd assume would filter through from R&B etc too. They both sound like that idiot from boyband Five (who may not be an idiot, but just talks and acts like one).

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                                      #19
                                      Your accent

                                      I'm not sure about the accent, but I do call people "m'duck", which is a conscious nod to where I'm from. Even though I never go back there, and I didn't like it much. I guess it's to differentiate myself from London.

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                                        #20
                                        Your accent

                                        Oh man, I could talk about this kind of stuff all day. I LOVE sociolinguistics.

                                        Vulgarian Visigoth wrote: Has your accent changed over the years? Do you speak with the same accent as your parents? Do your children speak with the same accent as you?
                                        No and yes, no, don't know yet but almost certainly not.

                                        No, in the sense that most of the time I still sound like a San Franciscan. No, in the sense that my parents are from Connecticut and usually sound like New Englanders most of the time (35 years in SF has flattened a lot of their differences - when my aunt who has never lived out of New England was in town you could really notice the difference between her and my dad).

                                        Not Katharine Hepburn and certainly not Ben Affleck or Mark Wahlberg in whatever Boston movie they're in, but definitely New Englanders.

                                        Yes, in the sense that I code-shift pretty regularly in the UK, whether poshing up to clients or on the phone or moving downwards when I'm at the pub with mates and don't want to sound like a tourist.

                                        I'll also rather consciously sound more like an old-timey San Franciscan when I want to. Compare Nick Peters or Angela Alioto to Jesse Thorn or Aisha Tyler. Some of the affects of Peters or Alioto are naturally in my speech, but I'll play them up when I'm home versus every normal day, when I sound a bit more like Thorn or Tyler.

                                        The vowel merger going on in the US where Dawn/Don, caught/cot are sounding the same virtually blankets the western US - except for San Francisco. And me.

                                        Guy Profumo wrote: But is there anyone whose accent hasn't noticeably changed, but their dialect has?

                                        (e.g. changing speech patterns, using local coinage of words and grammar, etc.?)
                                        After nine years in the UK, it's a rubbish bin unless my brain reaches for trash can, whether I'm trying to sound like my co-workers or like somebody in the Dovre Club.

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                                          #21
                                          Your accent

                                          I'm a terribly cuckoo for accents. I spent 2 years in Salford and ended up sounding like Terry Christian at times.
                                          If I talk to work colleagues from SA or Australia I find myself reproducing odd bits of accent, lingo and dialect.
                                          I do the same when talking to people with more London accents which annoys me a bit.
                                          All of which means that I'm not nearly as well spoken as I used to be. I'm much more London than HampshireSurrey these days.
                                          My parents were from Brighton and Islington respectively but my Mother was absolutely insistent that we not drop Ts etc. when we were kids. I an still just about hear a bit of cockney in her but only at a real push. She deliberately dropped that like a stone when she move to Pumpkinland.
                                          As for the cu, he was grand until we moved to Bromley. At nursery all his carers were from around the world so no accent really stuck. Since being down here one of his two key workers has the worst kind of lazy South East accent. (Fs instead of Ts, "You done it" instead of "you did it" pronouncing water Waaw-urrr etc.) He's rather picked it up which drives me nuts. So I've turned into my mother, correcting him every time. With a bit of luck he'll lose it at school as almost none of his peers sound like it.
                                          He does of course mix that in with flat vowels as P is from Hull. Which sounds even weirder but I get smacked if I try to tell him it's baaath not bath.
                                          Despite being from Hull Pamela sounds posher and more home counties than I do, except fro the flat vowels. I had an ex who was the same but worse (only from Shrewsbury.) It's quite odd hearing a cut glass RP accept saying " Windsor cassle" instead of "Windsor carsul."

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                                            #22
                                            Your accent

                                            'All of which means that I'm not nearly as well spoken as I used to be', 'lazy English'
                                            Funny how the notion of RP as 'proper English' still lingers.

                                            Edit: If I heard my child say 'Baarth' I would go down on my knees in tears and wonder where it all went wrong.

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                                              #23
                                              Your accent

                                              I'm a terribly cuckoo for accents.

                                              I think I read once that this tendency is present in more empathetic people, so is probably to be welcomed.

                                              On the topic of American accents, one of the few modern TV shows I like is 'Storage Hunters', and a big part of why I like it is that it features plenty of people with the accents we never hear in the movies.

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                                                #24
                                                Your accent

                                                Your Usual Table wrote:
                                                Originally posted by andrew7610
                                                I also have two teenage boys who both apparently grew up in Jamaica.
                                                This is something that's interested me for a while. I have absolutely no evidence to back this up but it seems to me that Jamaican pronunciation is permeating the UK to different degrees, notably the pronunciation of the word "whatever." The examples that come to mind are, uh, Amy Winehouse and Kevin Bridges. There are a few instances during Winehouse's documentary where she punctuates her native Lahdahn sentences with a sharp "wa'evuh" which sounds distinctly Jamaican to my ears. I could understand a change like that happening in a city as cosmopolitan as London which would have seen a lot of immigration from Jamaica but it taking root in Glasgow is surprising. Listen to any of Billy Connolly's shows from the seventies or eighties. His pronunciation of "whatever" is something like "wateverrrrrr" with that final r rolled for all its worth. Kevin Bridges is (someone correct me on this) from a similar part of Glasgow yet his pronunciation of the word is "watevuh." Anyone else notice this or have I gone off the deep end?
                                                This would maybe explain Kevin Bridges. Still the progressive loss of rhoticity in Scots accents is something than has been documented.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Your accent

                                                  These days I sound more Brit than I did thirty-years ago. That's because I live with someone who speaks like Petula Clark. Spouse #1 OTOH was from right here. Basically in the UK people think I'm American and in Canada they reckon I'm FOB. I retain the hard 'a' from my Yorkshire childhood and pronounce 'one' as 'wun,' much to La Signora's amusement.

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