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 children don't have my natural accent (strong Welsh valleys) or the regional accent of the city we live in. They probably have my 'work' accent that I use to be understood by pretty much everyone outside of the area I grew up in.

However, both of them can keep up with what's being said back home. Most people can't tune into the pace and pitch of our conversations but my two manage it just fine even if they do sound like outsiders straight off the bat.

Neither of my children have my accent - I'm from another country - although they both have the odd phrase/inflection from us.

But what's really odd is that they both have local accents but DS is more "street" and DD's is a bit "posh".

No. They've got a weird mix of northern English, southern English and Kenyan.

We all have the same wonderful Midlands accent

I’m in North Norfolk but I previously lived and went to university in London and Hampshire. It felt like I was relearning English when I started talking to some of the locals up here and had to get dh to translate (he grew up in Cambridgeshire) - I’m fine now but North Norfolk seems to have a dialect in it’s own right!

In English yes - me and the DC all speak with a home counties/southern accent. DHs is a bit more London/Estuary English

In Italian I speak with my local Italian accent and the DC when they try, both speak with an English accent.

I love the Barnsley accent and dialect. It took me a while to be able to consistently understand it (an old university friend is from Barnsley).

My parents moved a few hundred miles when I was a baby so I grew up with the accent of the area I lived in, not my parents' accent. My children grew up in the same area I did so have a similar accent to mine.

DS 4 has a Northern Irish accent like me, except for some words which sound pure Dublin like DH.

It’s always really jarring when I hear him counting “one, two, three, four, FOYVE, six, seven…”

I'm from the North West but have lived in South Norfolk for about 23 years. Dh is from Norwich and dc have fairly neutral 'southern' accents. My parents find it a bit odd and whenever we go back up north the kids accents always get commented on. Dh finds it hard to make himself understood in the shops up there on occasion too!

I'm a Scot with an English husband living down south. My kids have definitely picked up the local accent and I'm on a one woman mission to get them to pronounce their "r"s.

Same here - I have a slight northern accent with short vowels but live in the south of England. DH is from SE London but doesn't have a very strong accent and it's much less than the rest of his family but they still live there. DS has a relatively posh sounding southern accent (not RP, just long vowels) but has the odd short vowel because of me.

DH's niece is from East Sussex/Kent border and her parents both have SE London accents but she sounds really posh. Her brother is somewhere between the two.

I have a friend who moved to Australia and her son hasn't picked up the accent at all. He is now in his mid 20s and has moved back to the UK and sounds much like he did when he left here originally!

Dh and I have Essex accents. We are not properly 'cockney' but you would know it's an Essex accent.
Ds2 sounds as if he attended a half decent private school and is very posh ( he went to very normal state schools )
We are not sure what happened there tbh lol
It is odd.

No, I have a Nottinghamshire accent, my husband has a Swedish accent, our son has a North London accent.

Dd sounds more like me. Although I am from the area we now live in, I never really picked up the accent.
Dh is delighted whenever she uses a Doric word but she has never picked up his Aberdonian accent.

I'm Scottish and my children's father is from a region of England with a distinctive accent. None of our DC have ever sounded like either of us except that DD3 used to flip into using a Scottish accent, complete with dialect words, whenever she visited my parents.

Welsh accent. Strong north walian. But my middle DC moved away 3 years ago and speaks English with a totally different accent to her welsh one.

My parents are from the midlands. Me and my siblings had southern accents, growing up in the north. Except when I went to secondary I chose to change it due to being bullied over my accent (my siblings were too, but didn't choose to)
I now live down south, and retain a mild northern accent (but dh is southern) and one of the dc (out of 3) also does.
My siblings have stayed up north and I'm always surprised how southern they and their dc sounds when I go back to see them.

DH and I are from South England, DS1 sounds like he would fit into the 3 counties no hint of a Scottish accent at all yet (is coming up to 5). No idea if it will change I thought he would have a hint by now but nope!

I struggle to understand the locals in Norwich and I’ve lived in Norfolk 7 years! Dh, the boys and I went to Sheringham beach a couple of weeks past and ds2 was our translator! Even ds1 and dh who grew up in East Anglia couldn’t follow. Ds2 does amuse me as he calls snails ‘dodiman’ and when he gets cross with his brother he calls him a ‘mawther’ which I assume he’s picked up at school (rural village primary). It’s quite cute really - I’m just waiting to be called Bor! I get called a ‘forriner’ frequently in Norwich…

Parents are both proper manc. I grew up in Manchester and was sent to a posh school still in Manchester, but as I was trying to sound posh to fit in with the others, my interpretation was a manc accent with a scouse twang, which has somehow stuck! People still ask me if I’m from Liverpool when I didn’t even visit the place until well into adulthood!

I have a Scottish accent which no one can really pinpoint to where I'm from (Glasgow but I suppose I have a very MC West End accent) and my husband has what I would call a generic south of England accent. We live in fairly rural NE Scotland and DD1 did have quite an English accent when she was very little but she's gradually become more Scottish the longer she's been at nursery. It's still quite generic though, she hasn't picked up the regional accent of where we live, and I don't know if she will or not. She's only 4, but some of the nursery kids her age def have more pronounced regional accents than her.

No I grew up in Suffolk although sound more like i'm from Essex.
My children have broad Brummie accents.

I'm a Kiwi, DH has a public school English accent. We live near Edinburgh but home ed, so I thought the children would have my accent. They do not, they have DH's accent, and I am a little miffed.

He has always read their bedtime stories, though, so that's probably why.

nope. I have a strong estuary accent. DC1 was born in the South, moved north, and has what's known in our house as a generic posh northern accent - hard to place but short, flat "a"s. DC2 is Manchester born and bred and sounds like Shaun Ryder.