lovingly-lightbulbs asked:
Hey dude. Sorry if you've answered this before, but I couldn't find an answer on your Tumblr and I figured Google wouldn't be of much help.
You've been living in the States for decades, but you still have your British accent. How is that?
Is it a conscious decision, do you travel to the UK enough that it's stayed with you, or do I have an abysmal understanding of how accents work?
Thank you
For Americans I may have an English accent. For anyone in Britain, or indeed most of the rest of the world, my accent just registers as “you aren’t from round here, are you?”
If you live in the same place while your brain is still developing its language center you’ll retain an accent for way longer than if you’ve moved even in the same country, which may be at play here.
I moved from Paris to Alsace when I was twelve, so my Alsatian accent comes and goes pretty easily, and of course as a non-native speaker of English I’ve learned it in school with a British accent only speak it with a decent-to-good American one at the end of my 4-months stay in Florida, which I’ve lost a lot of going back to France.It’s a whole field of linguistics and it’s very interesting.
I have a similar thing. I was taught to speak Received Pronunciation (posh) despite growing up with in the West Country (pirate). When I moved to London for college, what little of the WC accent I had eroded. But when I came home back for holidays it would come back if only a little. Now that I’ve moved to Sweden the West Country accent is pretty much gone apart from a few words such as “summer” “flower” “winter”.
As for when I speek Swedish I do so with a Gothenburg accent as it’s easier for me to pronounce, even though I don’t live in Gothenburg, hah.
