Do your dc have your accent?

[Whatsthepoint1234]

I was having this conversation with a colleague earlier about our regional accents and it made me think about whether children take more of their parents accent or their peers accent. My area has a fairly distinctive accent, lots of the people from where we live have never lived anywhere else! Pretty much all the local older generation I meet at work have quite a ‘broad’ version of this accent however both my sons sets of friends have standard southern accents. My husband is from the same region and grew up about 1.5 hours away and both his parents are Asian but he grew up in a very mc white area and mainly socialised with white British people, he sounds RP to me with a slight Asian tint. I grew up abroad have the accent of my native country (came for university). Both my dc get asked where they are from as they pronounce some words ‘funny’ but sound mostly British. What accent do your dc have, is it more regional or more like yours?

My kids have the accent of where we live (and they were born). I have an accent which is a generic East Mids' accent, but isn't the accent of my home town.

Dh and I are hard to place. Vaguely Northern, but we've moved about. I've taught for 20 years, with people from all over the country, so any accent I had has been flattened. People from the South think I sound scouse. Scousers think I sound posh. My mum thinks I sound common (she was v welsh).

My kids sound more like me in terms of accent, but then, the accent round here is on a kind of continuum from Welsh to scouse,but neither can pronounce a 'th', which is a feature round here. They also use local grammatical constructions. Dc2 more than dc1, as he lives in YouTube and tiktok, therefore thinks he's living on an island just off the coast of America.

No- I have an American accent and my DC are as British as they come 👍🏼

We live in Scotland both dc have the accent of the area of Scotland we are in. Dh is from here too and same for him. None of them really speak much of the dialect though, more pronunciation.

I'm from NE England and until ds (eldest) was about 3/4 and mixing with peers he had an accent like mine.

I don't live in the area I grew up in, and do still have the accent.

I now live in an area that has its own distinct accent - which DH does have.

DS has my accent, not the accent of the area he lives in, which is his Dad's accent.

My daughter (4) doesn't even have my language, let alone accent! I used the local language when talking to her when she was a baby so that my then-5 year old SD wouldn't feel excluded. I used English when we were alone but that wasn't often.

As time went on it just got.. easiest to do so.

So to answer... no idea! I guess I'll find out in a few years...

I live in NI but am English. DD is 5 and currently sounds almost entirely English. She sounded a lot more NI before DH died when she was 2. I'm hoping her NI accent comes back!

I have twins who have different accents! They are both neuro diverse. Twin 1, DD has a very clipped formal accent and is always asked where she is from, her twin brother has a scouse accent 😂Their older sister has a mild liverpool accent and is called posh in school. DH is Dutch with a neutral accent, and I'm a scouser, but lived all over the place, so not particularly strong accent...unless I'm drunk!

Me and DH are both from overseas living in London and TTC. I’m quite weirded out that we will most likely have a fully English sounding child 😂

Your comment reminded me of the Kevin Bridges Glasgow uni joke 😅

My kids have a mid-Atlantic/US accent as we live in the Caribbean.

The older they get, the stronger it sounds. Nothing we can do about it, I've got a British accent, DH is Scottish.

Shockingly, neither of them can "do" a British or a Scottish accent.

I don't mind their accents at all, it's the YouTube language they speak in that gives me the irk!

@Biscuitandacuppa ds13 gets told he sounds American funnily enough as well. He’s autistic and sounds the most ‘foreign’ out of my two. He also is fluent in my native language which he speaks in my accent. I wonder if this is peoples perception of him as well as he looks the most ‘foreign’ out of my dc.

@tarheelbaby funnily enough my mother commented on this on our last visit home, I’ve been in England for nearly 22 years and she’d never said it previously. My accent speaking my native accent was always slightly ‘different’ though, my grandfather actually grew up speaking a minority language and we were from a fairly insular minority group. We were definitely ‘poor’ (class isn’t such a thing) but I never picked up the distinctive local accent of our city. British people never guess my accent though, they can’t even guess the right continent!

Dh grew up in a very posh white area and was the only ‘non-white’ person at his private school. In his parents home country they were from a wealthy family so they have ‘posh’ accents from their country. Dh says he only started getting an ‘Asian’ tint to his accent went he started med school, where there are lots of Asians and he met other people from his country. His brother on the other hand has a much stronger Asian accent.

I’m from Newcastle and DH is from Salisbury. We live in south London and my boys have south London accents. Not mega strong and no slang but they say ‘barth’ instead of ‘bath’ as an example. They add the odd northern word in sometimes but generally nothing like me

I'm from the north but live in the south. My DC were born in the south and their Dad is from the south. My dcs accents chop and change, makes me laugh and I don't think they even sound like each. One of my DC did start mispronouncing words and with a local to us accent when a bit younger, which fortunately they have corrected now. Other DC has always had speech issues, nearly all resolved but when they are tired, they can come back, but as a result doesn't speak like me really.

I'd say in my experience from the area they grow up. My cousin lives in London. He's Irish and wife is Irish. Dc have London accents. They all went to childcare (nursery) from a year old so that prob made a difference.

It’s funny re the tiktok/YouTube thing. YouTube is banned in our house and ds13 doesn’t use tiktok (or any social media). Ds7 doesn’t use tiktok either as neither dh or I have tiktok! Both of them speak my language and English. Dh can speak both his parents languages and English. I am fluent in my families minority language (that I learnt as an adult, as I was only passable in it before), my home language, English and can read another language. Funnily enough my dc both use lots of phrases, sayings and nicknames from my minority language that I grew up using, we also use dh’s families word for penis but that is it. It must be very confusing for eavesdroppers.

My ds13 did actually have a speech delay which required SALT. To this day he does say some words in the therapists very RP accent! Our local to us accent is an odd one, it always sounds to me like a mix between a Northern, London and West Country accent (Norfolk).

She has a soft north Welsh accent as it's where she grew up, although she adds the odd Norwegian lilt to some words which she gets from her dad and does often get asked about her accent. My Welsh accent is stronger than hers.

If we go visit my family who are all quite a bit stronger accented than her, she goes very Welsh. If she goes to visit my husband's side of the family she comes back with a much stronger Norwegian accent that takes a couple of weeks to fade back to normal.

I'm from London originally but grew up with a Tennessee native parent, so I have a funny twang. DC all sound quite posh so far. DH has a standard English accent- grew up in Norwich but parents from London so no particular quirks.

Thankfully mine aren't on TikTok but they view YouTube shorts for random recipes.
My god some of the shite they spout! 😆

All their friends have mixed accents as well and their teachers have a mix of British/Canadian accents so I think it's very peer heavy here.

Oh and my parents sent me to elocution lessons when I first started private school and I now speak like a "Jackanory" presenter.

Dh is Spanish ( has a very strong accent) and finds it weird that he has three dcs with ‘posh’ English accents .

I'm British with a pretty neutral accent (people can't guess where I'm from when I speak).

I live overseas in a non-English-speaking country and my kids go to international school. The older two went through a phase of speaking with a bit of a local accent with some words/phrases, which was both entertaining and inexplicable as although they do have local friends at school, it is a very diverse group with mixed accents. Their teachers are mostly British.

Now, all of them speak what I can only describe as global English (which leans American rather than Britsh). They say cookie, trash, diaper etc even though I don't. Their pronunciation varies a little but tends to be slightly American (e.g. they pronounce the letter 'r' more than me in words like 'car'). We went to the UK this summer and friends commented that they sounded American, though I'm sure an American wouldn't think so! They do know a few Americans here but more Brits, Indians, Australians and loads of people with English as a second language.

Our nanny has a foreign accent and they have picked up some bits from her, too, for example the way she makes a diminutive would be to add 'u' rather than 'y' or 'ie' and they sometimes do the same. They called me 'Mamu' recently instead of Mummy which I thought was hilarious and isn't a word in my nanny's language or the local language here!

I find it all fascinating and wonder how they will sound when they're older, and also how malleable their accents might be given that they don't really have a solid 'foundation' of any one particular accent.

DH is from Kent and I'm from Derbyshire but we've both lived in Norfolk since being youngish, apart from a brief stint in South Yorkshire.

DH has a mild Kent accent, mixed with some Norfolk tones at times. I have no discernible regional accent. My relatives all describe my accent as "posh" but they simply mean I don't have a South Derbyshire accent or flat vowels. The DC are the same as me but are astonishing mimics and can do most accents accurately (as can I). DH interestingly, can't do any accents but slips into an excruciating facsimile of whichever accent is around him at any given time.

We're from Barnsley and have a very very strong regional dialect, my son has the very same accent. Except when he's talking to his mates on Xbox where he speaks very posh!