Parents with children who have different accents

[Raella50]

This is a silly little thing I’m worryyying about and just wanted to ask others for their experiences. At the moment my children are starting to speak more and more each day which is wonderful! They will most likely develop very different accents to me and I’m worried that the way I teach them to say words will sound funny in their accent? Should I be changing the way I say words to help them? I don’t want them to struggle with their peers when they go to school. They do hear other people around them obviously but I’m the one teaching them words all the time and I say them differently in my accent to how theirs will develop (due to where we live). Should I be adapting to the local accent? I find it difficult and very unnatural to speak that way. Thanks all.

Your children will develop their own accent as they get older and have different influences. Just speak in your usual accent, your dc will find their own way.

Carry on as you are.
I am Welsh, husband is North East, kids speak pure Northern where they were born and brought up.

They haven't adopted my pronunciation of saucepan (sospan) despite my best efforts

DH is half Welsh, half Spanish, brought up in the south of England. I was brought up in the Midlands. DD1 spent the first few years of her life in the SW and has a Bristol twang. DD2 is generally Midlands like me with a hint of SW and long ‘a’s. It’s all fine, don’t overthink it!

They will end up with an accent that works for them- and it may not even be the same for each child. My dd speaks in a very "posh" accent while my ds speaks in the local accent.

Children are individuals with their own individual identities. Just as they are not empty vessels which we pour ourselves into, so we as parents also have our own identities and it is good for them to see that we are comfortable in our skin.

There is no need at all to change how you speak. They will adapt at school and their accents will probably shift over time, but don't let it affect how you speak to them. They'll be fine!

Hearing different accents is just a normal part of life - it shouldn’t have any negative affect. If anything could have a weird affect it would probably be putting on a fake accent. My husband and I have different accents and then the accents of people who live around us are different too. I’m actually bilingual, my mum spoke a whole different language at home never mind a different accent children are very adaptable to this. When they grow older their nursery workers/teachers won’t all have the same accents either. People on the TV all speak differently too. It’s completely fine.

I love when my kids say Scottish words in their wee English accents.

Actually neither have strong accents although I think that's partly due to where we live

I doubt they will ever have broad accents.

Thanks everyone, I feel a lot better now!

My eldest speaks like me (Home Counties) my youngest speaks like her dad (north) go figure ... we lived in neither!

They will find their own way and possibly code switch depending on who they are speaking with (although I am likely to get slaughtered on here for suggesting it, but within my circle it happens).

I only fully lost my Russian accent in my teens. It’s fine, if anything it’s helped me pick up accents quickly. I now have an RP-lite accent with a twang of wherever I live once I’ve been there a few months.

I do like to teach them our words. But on the other hand I try to make sure they know its a Scottish word and that in England they say ...........

So stookie for instance we said plaster cast.

And we would say slide instead of chute.

Both of my children were born in England, their father is English, I am Irish. We moved back to Ireland a couple of years ago... both children still have obvious English accents, despite being at school in Ireland. They have never said even the slightest syllable of a word in my accent 😂

Both me and DH are Scottish but we live in London. One DD actually sounds quite posh, the other is more street. They can both say Loch correctly though.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Accent is part of our identity, so we develop our own as we grow up. My parents and grandparents are not from where I grew up, but I have probably developed the strongest local accent out of the three of us (one older, one younger). Might be related to the fact I'm good at learning languages, or it might just be a result of my particular friends as a kid, who knows. I used to get teased occasionally for sounding "posh" but I would have sounded worse if I'd learnt my DM's poor attempts at imitating the local accent! Nowadays living at the other end of the country I'm proud of my local accent but also proud of the bits of words and phrases inherited from grandparents via my parents who grew up in a different place to their own parents. It's all part of my identity.
Having said that I did used to "code switch" between home and working in the local shop (at work I was unconsciously much broader and used more regional grammar, to fit in), and Dsis speaks completely differently at university to at home.

My lo speaks in two accents. There’s the one for school and the one for when she wants to remember where she came from. Its good to know both, I think, as some of the local words make no sense elsewhere.

The only time we ever found it a “problem” was when teaching vowel sounds in phonics lessons in school.

I am Northern Irish, DH is English and we lived in Scotland and a couple of years in the US.

DC tended to speak with more of a Northern Irish accent until they started school. Their accents weren’t as strong as mine, but they definitely didn’t sound Scottish or English. They all picked up the local accents (in both Scotland and the US) to varying degrees when they started school. I think just the widening of voices they were hearing outside the home had a significant impact.

Phonics was a bit of a nightmare (and we have regular “discussions” with DH about what words are homophones of each other) as the vowel sounds in a Northern Irish accent are very different to a Scottish accent which are different again to an English accent. We just had to work around that - and on two occasions I had to speak to teachers about our accent and ask them to stop telling DC they were wrong for pronouncing words in the way that is natural to us!