If you have a different accent to your children

[doadeer]

My son is a toddler so just starting to build words. I'm from NE but live in an area of London with a "neutral accent" - DH has more of a London accent (not neutral)

I say BOOK rather than BUCK, GRASS rather than GRARSE etc.

His nursery when he goes back has lots of different accents including nationalities and regional accents.

Just curious how your children's accents developed if you live somewhere different to where you grew up.

I’m really intrigued by this - me and my parents all have generic northern accents despite growing up in different towns.

I now live down south in an area with quite a strong local accent and DH is Aussie with South African heritage, so has a really unusual accent. His siblings all had South African accents until they were about 6/7, so really intrigued to see how our kids end up sounding!

@massistar My DS’s attempt at a Glaswegian accent is hideous (despite hearing a particular version of Glaswegian accent all the time - there are several different accents within Glasgow).

DS can do a fairly convincing strong local accent, but he’s taking the piss when he does it. He thinks it’s a stupid sounding accent. Tbh, I think the standard local accent in this area is pretty horrible (but I’m certain loads of people think that about mine 😆) so I’m quite glad DS has a different, much more generic, version of it.

My nephews have really strong West Midlands accents (specific ones to the town they live in). But my sister is in total denial about it. DH and I had to stifle laughs as she explained that her children didn’t really have accents. They SO do.

There is no such thing as a neutral accent. And to think such is cultural imperialism.

I agree on there being no such thing as a neutral accent, I bet I could tell where the majority of the people who think their accent is neutral live.

I'm also not sure why people think that a southern accent is neutral. It's not,it's a southern accent.

DH and I from the East Midlands, DS1 born in Oxford. During his pre-school years he did start with the grarrse parrrth barrth thing but lost it and returned to shortened vowels. He used to say he was the only kid without a local accent at school. He's now an adult and has a fairly nuetral accent but still grass not grarrse.

DS2 is 14 and occasinally uses local accent. OH is from the NE and as a toddler DS would switch his accent depending on who he talked to

Relatives in the NE all think DS 'talks posh' and fail to understand it's just his local accent

Generic is probably a better term to use when discussing a non-regional accent with no discernible features.

There are more or less neutral accents though. You get people with really specific, strong, extremely local accents and others with much more neutral or generic accents that are hard to pinpoint beyond a much broader area.

It’s true that everyone has an accent (even if some people are in denial about it) but there are degrees of neutrality within those accents. Often people end up neutralising their original accents because they need to be understood by a wider range of people. They still have accents though.

DH’s is really quite generic but northern. He’s moved around a lot (as a child and an adult), lived abroad, and has to speak to people all over the world every day at work. Over the years he’s smoothed out most of the locally identifiable features of any of the northern accents he might have had and it would be impossible to say where he’s actually from. You could probably guess he spent more time in the NW than the east side of the country - but it’s not any ‘properly’ local accent by any stretch of the imagination.

Urgh @Sodamncold there's always one

My husbands family are Scottish but now live in the NW. His parents have very strong Scottish accents. DH spent a lot of time in Scotland growing up with his grandparents etc.

He has a very typical for the area northern accent. Not even a bit of a Scottish twang to it.

I'm a brummie and currently live in a 'commuter town' just outside Birmingham, but don't have a strong accent unless I ring my sister or am drunk . My children but especially my ds has a broad Birmingham accent. I love it, it reminds me of home!

I live in Liverpool but grew up in the Home Counties.

My kids are pure Scouse

Bloody enter button.

He does come out with a lot of Scottish slang though. Just in a typical norther accent.

I however can sound like Peter Kay when I get going . I have a very strong northern accent, exactly like my parents.

DD(18) talks like whoever she’s with at the time. Southern accent at home, Yorkshire accent with friends. And then after 10 minutes with the Australian cousins she’s gone all Australian

Ok. Maybe generic is a better term than neutral. But hey, I've got a broad Glaswegian accent so what I think of as neutral is that kind of generic Englishy non-local accent.

Live up north but from South East. My kids have a northern accent but I've noticed it's not as strong as some people's, probs coz they spend so much time with me! I do live in an area though where many locals accents are not particularly strong northern.

DD (3.5) makes me laugh. She says 'dance' and 'craft' with the 'Southern R' sound (neither DH or I do and we live in the West Midlands), but she occasionally loses the H on words like 'hair', which is something my regional accent does but that I didn't think I actually did. So either I sound more Northern than I think or she's picking it up from the very small amount of time she spends with my parents.

@Bubblesbuddy, but Essex is a home county?

My mum is from the North, also says book and grass. My DC started translating from a very early age. So if mum was reading with them and she said a word was "bath", they would read it back as barth.

It didn't always go right though. DS1 was convinced anti aircraft guns should be pronounced arnty aircraft....

Ha! My husband and I were northerners transplanted in the SouthEast when we had our children. When they started saying 'GRAHSS and BAHTH' it seemed like we'd bred little aliens!

But yes, their accent is definitely local, and if our accents influenced them at all, it's not noticeable to me.

I have a nottinghamshire accent, we live in Central/North London so he has a very different accent to me. Now he’s not been at school for a few weeks he’s slipping slightly more Nottingham.

He only hears me speak Urdu, so he does have the same accent went speaking in Urdu.

Do you mean you pronounce “book” as “BOOWK”? Because “buck” isn’t anything like “book” in my accent! Only playing of course. There’s no correct way, I wouldn’t worry about it. Although my kids have a different accent to me and it does feels a little strange!

I think neutral is fine actually. If someone says they want to paint a room a ‘neutral colour’, they don’t mean no colour. They mean something that will just blend into the background more than, say, pikachu yellow.

Same with accents. I (now) have the kind of Glasgow accent you could describe as a fairly ‘neutral’ one. Rather than anything ‘broad’ or ‘strong’. It’s all a bit BBC Scotland these days 😆.

It used to be stronger, but very specifically local to the area I grew up in (and would be thought of as one of the possible ‘posh Glasgow’ accents). But years of living elsewhere have neutralised it quite a lot. It does get stronger if I go home though.

I quite regularly come across (english) people who refuse to accept that I’m Glaswegian. They think my accent is totally generic scottish and will not accept that I’m from Glasgow because I don’t sound like the extremely strong (verging on caricatured) accent they’re imagining I should have. It’s a bit annoying really. Scottish people can (usually - I did meet someone from Dundee who seemed to think I might also be from Dundee, which is very odd indeed) usually work out it’s a fairly neutral version of Glaswegian though.

Anyway, I think it’s ok to say you have a fairly neutral accent so long as you recognise it’s still an accent and will be geographically locatable to some degree. If you’re claiming you have no accent (and people do); it’s probably fairly neutral Home Counties - whatever you claim.

I have a similar accent to Dh (although he says I'm more farmer/rural, which is probably true). We don't live far, less than 8 miles, from the town we grew up in but the children have different accents to us.

My Mum has lived in v rural mid Wales for over 20 years now & has a v Welsh accent/inflections. My cousin has lived in Oz for 35 years (so for longer than she lived in the U.K.) & only has the merest hint of an Ozzie accent, her brother has lived in the States for slightly longer & you'd never know he wasn't born & raised out there.

I'm from Yorkshire, DH is southern and we live in the midlands. The DC all speak in a similar accent to mine, although the local accent is very similar to my accent anyway.

I wasn't saying anyway was proper or improper 😟I suppose how my DH speaks is more "proper" than me as it's newsreader speaker whereas my accent would be considered regional rather than standard. I was spelling it out like that as Geordie tends to be more phonetic.

We live in a posh area so there is no way he will speak like me 🤣