Child's accent

[thatstheviewfromhere]

Just moved from down south to way up north where the accent is very broad. 8 year old currently speaks in a posh southern accent - will that stay the same or will their accent change over time? I know nobody can say for sure, but fun to know other people's experiences!

I'm a southerner, moved up north when the kids were between 6 and newborn and they are multilingual! They speak 'southern' at home or when they are with me, but their accents broaden and become more northern when they are talking to their local friends.

In addition, I am often put on 'phone duty' at work, because, apparently 'you sound posh'.

The kids never really suffered due to having different accents, because there was a fair bit of coming and going at their school and lots of accents mixing and mingling. I've got one 'friend' who thinks it's really funny to say things like 'there's no arrr in barth, it's pronounced baaath'. But I just tell him to piss off.

It'll soften significantly

We moved from the north to the south when I was 13. I still have a northern twang (now 40's) as in I still pronounce my vowels like a northerner - Grass rather than graaass etc. People sometimes pick up on my accent, sometimes they don't.

It turns really strong when I'm talking to someone from an area we lived in!

Same for us, my brother is 2 years younger than me and has pretty much lost his northern twang - although I think the posh private secondary school he attended probably contributed to that..

my 2 year old has such a mixed accent! we are irish - she has a real dublin accent half the time and then a real east london accent other times and a posher English accent sometimes - a mix of us and what she hears at nursery and friends of ours i guess

DP and I both dropped our Black Country accents when we started working in places that it was highlighted at. His comes back when he's had a drink.

We moved further south last summer and our children are already saying 'parss' instead of pass etc which is cute, especially as they still also say words like 'love' in a Black Country accent

It can change at any age!

Mine changed from mild Northern to full RP at university. Then more and more…West London/Sloaney? (don’t know how else to describe it!) after I graduated and started working in London.

No one at work believes I’m not from the SE.

I kept my Yorkshire accent all the way through school. Then I started working in a hospital and older people couldn't understand me so I started using the local accent.

I've moved to different cities and my accent can now cross three counties in one sentence.

I now live in Wolverhampton, one of my neighbours moved from London, she ended up fostering 3 of her grandchildren who all spoke with London accents, or so I thought, until I gave one a lift home and she talked to her friends in complete Yam Yam and switched when she got in the car.

My brother lives in Cornwall, he still has his Yorkshire accent. He's been there about 40 years, he does use the odd Cornish word.

So your answer is.

Maybe, maybe not. They will probably be able to put on either accent when they want.

To some extent I think it varies a lot. DD began to speak with the accent of wherever she lived after a while. As an adult she is sort of back to her original accent although she lives at the other end of the country. Some people’s don’t seem to change much. My DGM and all her siblings kept the original accents of their birth country all through their lives despite coming to the UK when they were between 8 - 14.

I was 7 when I moved from Kent to Wales. My brother was 4.

Within a year my brother had a Welsh accent, and he's kept it despite moving back to England at 19.

I on the other hand have never picked it up, despite having lived here for 33 years at this point. Those three extra years were obviously formative and my accent was fixed in place by the time we moved.

I think this really depends on the child tbh. Some kids never let go of their accents, others switch around to their immediate area quite quickly. Lots of kids code switch between home and school too, or will take over the accent of someone who is speaking to them whilst they're in a conversation and than change. It's incredible!

Lol. I’m from Hampshire and moved to Essex, I didn’t realise how broad my southern accent was. 19 years on when I go to see family in the South they say I sound ‘Essex’ but apparently in Essex I still have my South coast twang.

my kids though lol, the 3 eldest maintained their Southern accents, but the youngest who was just a baby and not speaking when we moved is Essex through and through.

Ive moved to Norfolk now with 2 tiny granddaughters that live with me, will be interesting to see how they sound lol

I love accents! I love how some people can live somewhere for a couple of years and their accent changes completely, and how some people live somewhere for 20+ years and their accents barely change.

My favourite group of accents comes from my friend's family. She is American, he is from the South of England and they live in Yorkshire, so all their kids have really broad Yorkshire accents.

I often chuckle at what people must think when they hear them out and about - it must sound like they've kidnapped the kids!

My MIL and her sister were from Staffordshire and moved down South in the 1960s. They both have really strong accents still.

Me, on the other hand, I have a normally Southern accent, but having spent a few years living in Scotland as a child, whenever I speak to someone Scottish, or spend time there, I can flip my accent. What's really weird is that if I deliberately try to do a Scottish accent I just can't. It just comes out naturally in the odd word or two.

I'd say accents probably change more when you're a child though. Partially because they're still developing, but partly because they'll change it themselves to "fit in" with the other kids.

My MIL is originally from Newcastle, but now has a totally SE accent as expected in Hampshire.
I have the same accent, and have always considered myself 'posh' until my Scottish friends imitated mine and my three children's accents as very very Oliver Twist London style.

My family are Northern. I think you need to get over yourself a bit

Is it a 'posh southern accent', though, or is it a southern accent (cockney, estuary etc). I ask because I'm a northerner (who speaks RP due to private schooling) who has lived in the south for decades. Despite not speaking with a northern accent (and I guess that's why people felt free to confine their prejudices to me!!) I feel a strong loyalty to northern accents and resent the snobbish attitude to them.

The irony is that most of the people who've expressed their horror at such accents, or that their children might pick them up, have spoken with what I hear as cockney or estuary - or other southern accent. I got the impression they didn't see themselves as having an accent - ha ha!

Sorry - confide, not confine! I wish they had confined their prejudices....

You think the Black Country accent is wonderful and you don’t think that’s why @Dwightlovesmichael DH would be overlooked.

Having grown up within what I imagine is a 5 mile radius of @Dwightlovesmichael DH I can confirm that discrimination against the Black Country accent is very much a thing and I don’t even have one. My first job in a call centre I often had calls passed over to me because customers couldn’t understand my colleagues speaking and I was fairly frequently then greeted with “oh thank god, you sound intelligent” 🙄

@thatstheviewfromhere I grew up in the depths of the Black Country - but with a fully RP accent as that’s how my dad spoke (private education, Oxbridge, Barrister) , I code switch when talking to my mom who is slightly broader but apparently I even speak Black Country posh 😁

My brother who now works in a more blue collar environment is very broad Black Country - but I think that started so he could fit in with his peer and now it’s just his accent.

if you just listened to the two of us you wouldn’t guess we grew up in the same county let alone the same house.

When my girls were 9 and 7 we moved 80miles further north from the home counties.
There is a definite more northern accent here and my girls picked up local words and some pronunciation changed - for instance - I say grarse (grass) and they say grass - or parth and path.
Otherwise they still speak more southern than their local friends.

Most kids will change to match theyre surroundings, i moved a lot when i was a kid and ended up with a mix of accents but when i moved at 9 i had a posh southern accent, by 12/14 i had a country southern accent haha

I think that's pretty normal, especially where mothers do most of the parenting.

My siblings and I were born and brought up in the West Country. Our father had a Lancashire accent. We all speak with our mother's RP accent.

We move house regularly as children and always quickly adopted the accent of where we were living.

Yes, it'll change.

I spent my early years in Somerset and moved to the midlands when I was 7. I can still remember my auntie laughing and saying "she talks like a Brummie now!"

(Which is rich, because she has a REALLY strong black country accent)

Some people have a kind of accent-chameleon thing. I don't mean speaking 'local' to fit in or to try to be 'matey'. It can be partly or completely outside the person's conscious control. I don't know the technical name for it., although I did read it once. I myself am like that. A sarky colleague used to say things like 'Charlie, that person you were talking to on the phone, they weren't Scottish by any chance?'. My husband says I go all 'ooo-arr' when I talk to Bristolians, the thought of which makes me cringe. He does say himself that if you don't say the letter 'r' like West Country folk do, some can't make out what you're saying. He's from Lancashire. I think a roaming childhood can influence it. My parents were mother: 'respectable' Cockney/South London, father: middle class Leicestershire. I spent part of my childhood in Castle Donington, then we moved to a part of south London, which could be 'Herne Hill' 'Erne 'Ill' depending on who you were talking to. My mother took care not to drop aitches or terminal 'g', but not doing so came naturally to my father. They wanted me to be 'well spoken' ('don't say 'ain't' - say 'isn't', etc etc!) I went to council schools up to age 11 then Alleyn's then moved to Bristol aged 18. So I think I have never had a 'fixed' accent. If I record myself when I'm alone, and play it back, I sound the way BBC announcers used to sound, or maybe a bit posher. I used to worry about the way I speak, but not so much these days. I do have an 'ear' for accents. I had an Irish boyfriend when I was a teenager, and when I first met his parents and grandparents, his mum said 'Charlotte, will you do your Ian Paisley for Grandpa?'. They all fell about. Reludgeon!

As a young adult in Bristol, I knew a woman with two children, an ardent socialist I thought, who sent her daughter to a private school. I said 'I thought you didn't approve of them'. She said 'It was a hard choice, but I felt I didn't want her to grow up with a dreadful Bristol accent'. I had to suppress my mirth, as she had a very noticeable Southampton accent. I met the daughter as an adult and she talks like the BBC, so maybe it worked.

Maybe, maybe not
I was born in London, by 21 I'd lived in the Netherlands, the US, NE England and S Wales. Scottish dad, "posh" southern mum.

Moved to Yorkshire. Kids born here. They have a sort of hybrid accent. Short vowels, but not identifiable as here, or anywhere, really.

DD has lived in London all her life. Her dad speaks with a Cockney accent. I come from Northamptonshire. DD has no trace of a London or HC accent at all. Totally neutral. It's bizarre. Her cousin who lives in Kent has more of a cockney accent than she does!

I came to London at 19 and I say words and phrases that I've adopted from my DH but he takes to mickey because to him I sound like I come from Northamptonshire which is neutral but with a slight country twang. My brother still lives where we grew up and he takes the mickey out of my Cockney accent!