Accent acquisition in young children

[argyllherewecome]

I'm a teacher but have been off work sick so I've had loads of time to think (for a change!). Anyway, this is something that has fascinated me for ages and I'm sure there are posters here who know about this.
My school is fairly diverse. Most children with ESL parents come into school either with no English or basic words that have a distinct mother tongue accent. They lose this within several years usually, and by then they have a local accent.

I've noticed though some children do not adopt a local accent.
Irish Travellers: despite being born and raised here they nearly exclusively all have a very thick Irish accent, and this doesn't change over time. There are a few other children that have parents or a mother at least from different parts of the country, and they keep a very strong regional accent from them, which doesn't change much over time. This is an exception rather than a rule though.

Any language experts that can explain how this happens? I'm the embarrassing sort of person that goes somewhere for a few days and I pick up accents!

it isn’t othering- it is an actual English phrase popularly used - a quick google comes up with:

‘A thick accent is a strong, noticeable way of speaking that is associated with a particular region or area. It can also be called a broad accent.’

nothing remotely offensive about it.

Accents are interesting.

My parents are from the midlands, but we lived in Lancashire.

We all went through primary with the same accent as my parents, and all got teased/bullied for it.
When I went t to secondary I made the conscious decision to change my accent.
When I came south for uni, I was immediately picked out as from Lancashire by my accent.
I've now been living in SE for longer than I lived in Lancashire and people still ask what part of Lancashire I'm from. When I go back, my accent goes broader very quickly.

My siblings OTOH have stayed up north and have still got my parents' accent.

@argyllherewecome , my mother and I sound very alike and you'd guess straight away that we were related if you spoke to us on the phone.
Our accents are different, it's the voices thar are similar.

@Mydogisamassivetwat , I love a Black Country accent.

I think I can explain it. I followed quite a few linguistics modules for my degree.
There is a certain hierarchy in language sounds, which makes it easier or harder to pronounce certain sounds. Eg the British “th” sound is at the highest (hardest) level, which explains why it is generally pronounced as a t or d sound by people in other countries. The hierarchy of this sound is th (high)- d (middle) - t (low). Languages with the high hierarchy sound can also pronounce the middle and low hierarchy sound. The middle sound (d) struggles with the high hierarchy sound (th) but has no issues with the t. But languages with only the t sound struggle with languages containing d or th sounds, and will pronounce these as t sounds. This is the reason that Dutch and German speakers tend to pronounce an English “bed” as “bet” and “with” as “wit”.
this is just one sound example. Just think of f-v or s-z and you’ll understand there are loads of sound hierarchy examples.

Yes Op, I've noticed the same. Schoolchildren, no matter the ethnicity/parental/home language, adopt the accent of their school peers.
The notable exception being Irish Travellers.

What?
no.
the term “thick accent” is used ALL the time to describe ANY very pronounced accent
e.g. Thick bromie, thick geordie, thick cockney, thick Yorkshire, thick scouse, thick Welsh, thick Glaswegian, thick highland, thick Irish, thick West Country,

thenonly exception is probably “queens English” or “received English” . I admit I never heard the queen described as having a thick received English accent 🤷‍♀️

get it now?

an apology to OP is in order.

I’ve aways found that some people have a more ‘malleable’ accent than others. So some people can live in another country for decades and their native accent not be affected, others like yourself only have to spend a short time somewhere before you start to adopt the accent! I think the same must go for children.

in the same way, I know some Spanish people who have perfectly fluent English but can’t lose their Spanish accent, and others aren’t actually as good at English but can emulate the accent better. I think it’s an individual thing.

That's because English isn't the first language for ESL kids, which is why they pick up their accent from their social environment, e.g., school, rather than at home from their family. Unlike native kids, who start to "absorb" their parents accent since the day the were born.

Maybe it is how many other people they spend time with that have that accent. If they are only experiencing the local accent in school it may not stick.
I would pronounce some words differently as a child as my Mum was northern (I was born in South). Most other people in my life had a southern accent so i soon had more of a southern accent.

I grew up somewhere with a strong local accent and dialect. I don’t speak with the accent because my mother “corrected” the dialect with her different accent. My childhood friend also had her dialect “corrected” but her mother had the local accent so she speaks with it.

These days I sound not British people can’t place my accent and I usually get scandavian/german guessed. Whereas my friend clearly sounds like where we are from.

neither of us can look at a wooden spoon without twitching

er, a strong one. And yes, there are indeed many Irish accents.

Any accent can be thick. I just used 'Irish' as a shorthand for all the various Irish accents. If it helps, my son speaks Irish, and complains that some of the accents they use in the aural exams are very thick and hard to understand - this isn't just an English thing. When I lived in Spain, I had to try very hard to Spanishify my Spanish, as if my English accent was too thick in the Spanish I was speaking, they often didn't understand me.

I can dial up my accent until it's fairly unintelligible to people who aren't from where I'm from, just like lots of us can. I can also dial it down when I'm speaking to people from other places, with other accents, to make it easier for them to understand me.

I lived in Australia from 3 till 20, I had a very strong Australian accent, but consciously tried to “lose” it. It still emerges when I’m tired or stressed or drunk. My friend who is Welsh, used to speak in the same accent unless she was with her family, then she was back in the Valleys.

Thick is a way of describing an accent, it doesn't mean it sounds stupid. It just means the accent is very strong.

The reason I posted was because years ago there was a thread where a poster was making fun of her colleague who had gone to USA for the summer and had come back with a "fake accent". A poster who was in the know talked about the neurolinguistics of how some people are more 'prone' to picking up accents than others. I can't find the explanation, so I was hoping the poster might still be around.
I'd say about 95% of children develop a local accent, with a few exceptions. I'm really interested to know how/why this is. I'm remembering now a Malaysian family where the parents both spoke perfect English with a strong (I'll not use the T word) Malay accent, both daughters spoke with a very noticeable American twang, despite being born and raised in the UK. Fascinating stuff!

Gosh you really are looking for issues here aren’t you. OP has clarified she meant thick as in strong not stupid. You clearly are gagging for an argument

Some people are keen to find offence in anything.

I suspect there’s something too this, as different languages involve quite different mouth movements to speak them with a correct national accent and intonation.

Other thoughts:

Children are said to have perfect pitch up to about 2, enabling them to learn any language, and ‘absorb’ languages up to about age 10, after which they need to learn them more formally. It still takes time to learn the new language- years to do it properly- but there’s a different cognitive process going on than in an adult brain.

Interestingly, if a child grows up bilingual from (near) birth, their accents may not settle until about 12. My bilingual DS apparently still has a slight English overtone to his completely fluent, ahead-of-his-classmates German.

There’s also the concept of convergence and confluence, a sometimes subconscious and sometimes conscious to either make your accent different to the person you’re speaking to, or to move closer to their accent. It may depend if the child identifies more with its family or its friends at a certain life stage.

A friend who hated moving away from Canada at 13 still has an extremely strong Canadian accent 30 years later. Her siblings sound more/completely British.

Then, there’s bidialectilism, where people have different accents for different places or situations. The actor Gillian Anderson is a good example - she spent some of her childhood in London and will automatically use a British accent when talking to a Brit, and an American when in the US. An acquaintance sounded Scottish with her parents and southern with us.

Fascinating stuff!

DH and I both grew up in the SE of England and have southern accents. We settled in Yorkshire 25 years ago. The DC (13,16) were born, bred and brought up locally, but don't have local accents. They sound more like me than anyone.

I imagine op meant strong she wasn't using thick as a insult.

There are lots of factors in picking up and retaining accents - age, length and degree of exposure to a particular one; number of other accents exposed to; cultural significance and strength of cultural identity etc.

In the case of children of English speakers moving to another area vs children whose parents don't speak (much) English I'd expect the latter to be much more likely to pick up a local accent. Because that's the accent they hear most when speaking English; if the home.language is a different one they may well retain their original accent in that language, but nor transfer it across.

But as well as the 'group' reasons for picking up accents or not, there are definitely individual factors. My grandmother and her cousin grew up next door to each other in a small village, went to the same school, had the same friends, socialised and played together - one spoke in not just a strong accent but full dialect; the other had just a trace of the accent in a vowel here and there. Similarly my grandfather grew up in an area known for a pronounced accent but never developed it strongly. And both grew up before TV, talkies, or even home radio sets. In both cases the accentless one had travelled more in adulthood, so may well have neutralised as they went along; but people who knew them when younger said they'd never had much of a local accent.

And my DP and I have very similar 'base' accents, but when we've moved areas - or even just on holiday or in extended conversation with someone with a different accent - he rapidly picks up traces. I don't. If anything I go the other way.

I moved a lot as a kid. I found that if I didn’t start , very quickly, talking like my friends at school, I’d be teased, or bullied. It’s survival.
maybe not in very young kids, but certainly by time I was 7-8 years old
i remember switching from Kent to Yorkshire age 10 was a bit of a baptism of fire…not just accent but words themselves…I still remember the ridicule was held in by referring to plimsolls not pumps 😱

But I was moving a lot where my school friends were my ONLY friends. Aside form two siblings both also facing this

I would suspect that these Irish travellers are a close community where these kids have a strong friendship group that will exert way more peer pressure to maintain their community accent, than then kids they’re in school class with.

it’s all down to fitting in socially and being accepted socially. Who these kids want to fit in most..and that’s cultural I should think. Nowt to do with language development

I think this is the explanation I'm looking for. Does an accent have power of pressure to conform? It appears it probably does. Will look into both of these terms, thanks.

My DC (both under 5) speak with a southern accent despite us living in a city with a very strong regional accent. I can only assume this comes from my partner and me (southern accents).

If I'm ever in a position to give up work, this sounds like a brilliant Phd thesis.

Then I ought to write it properly- convergence and divergence.

sorry!