To ask if your accent is the same as your parents ?

[Zinfandelfoot]

I was born in London as were both of my parents. I moved to Spain from when I was 2 until 15 and picked up a Spanish accent. Although I can’t speak it 😬 ( lived in a very touristy area). Both of my parents accents didn’t change. I still have a slightly Spanish accent. People always find this so strange.

Is your accent the same as your parents if you moved abroad when you was young?

@MasterBeth is right. Everybody has an accent. There is no ‘unaccented’ way of speaking.

Every accent can be described. Just because you don’t have the vocabulary that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I suspect that, at a very high level, the accent you refer to would be identifiable as “English” (distinguishable from American, Scottish, Australian, South African variations of English etc). Perhaps leave the definitive statements to the linguists? I’m sure you would not like people making categorical statements about legal things when they are not lawyers.

Well I thought we were talking about accents in the UK. Yes, they have an English accent. So do I, so does my DH but ours are all different so that’s not very helpful is it?!

What I want to know is why people are so offended about my DC’s not having a regional accent?! Weird!!!

Well if you bothered reading the whole thread you would have seen that I amended my statement to say that they have no regional accent which is what I thought this thread was about but, yes, please continue piling on. Hope it makes you feel good!

Well even within the UK English is only one of four accents isn’t it? So it’s not a useless descriptor.

It is for the purposes of this thread which was about whether people speak the same as their parents. If I say that I have an English accent and so do my DC’s that’s not very helpful given that the way we speak is not the same!

What I want to know is why people are so offended about my DC’s not having a regional accent?! Weird!!!

The reaction is because you are starting from the proposition that having a bland English accent is some sort of “neutral” and any regional accent must described with reference to how it varies from that self-proclaimed neutral accent. In other words, it comes across as very self-centred.

Now you are being ridiculous. My starting position was that I have a Yorkshire accent if you bothered to read the thread!!!

No, not at all. I did when I was very young, but our parents moved several hundred miles away, and my siblings and I grew up with slight to middling degrees of the local accent, in age order. I can still summon up my 'birth' accent without difficulty though, and a non-native wouldn't detect any differences.

I take it you're not a linguist!

But that’s not what you said. You said
My children are plainly spoken with no discernible accent. (By the way no edit to “regional accent” is showing up on my phone, but even that phrase connotes “the regions” as some sort of place that is “other” to South Central England. Cos you do realise that this “undiscernable” English is spoken by people whose class/socio economic status frowned on them speaking in a way which connected them to a specific part of the country?)

The accent is completely discernible. Nobody is questioning what you said about them not having the same accent as you. They are questioning the way you described how they do speak.

No. Are you? If so, please enlighten us?

I grew up in one of the Liverpool clearance towns in Cheshire (mid-Cheshire invokes "posh" thoughts, Winsford in the 70s & 80s was anything but!) and have a northwest accent as do my parents.

I moved to East Anglia for uni at 18 and never went back, I think my accent has softened over the years but definitely still an accent.

My children are 21 & 17 and were looked after by my mum part time while I was working (they moved to East Anglia to be near us).
When ds1 was small he had a very noticeable North West accent which was somewhat amusing in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

What has your accent (which is not mentioned in the post I quoted) got to do with your statement that your DCs accent is “undiscernable”?

My parents and whole family have west country accents. Mine has softened (not totally disappeared) from years living in different cities and working in a sector in which people tend to be from all over, so you are surrounded by a range of accents. I do sound quite different to my family and people often cannot place where I'm from when they meet me.
I have a friend who was born in the UK but grew up in Spain with English parents. She has a neutral English accent but speaks amazingly fluent Spanish so much so that you'd never know she isn't Spanish when she speak it.

@KingsleyBorder

I wouldn't dream of being so rude about your poor, and incorrect, use of linguistic terms (and the irony of that) but perhaps you should back off from other posters as it is coming across as bullying, and read their posts properly.

Are you a linguist or not mate?

Oh @KingsleyBorder maybe you should read all my posts and you would clearly see that I “apologised” and said that I meant that they didn’t have a regional accent.

I also mentioned that my DH has a Southern accent and my MIL a London accent. Those are regional accents too! I didn’t refer to the regions as being anywhere outside South central England. You made that up in your head!

I am from a working class background, comprehensive school educated and was on free schools meals for a long period of time so don’t lecture me about class/socio economic status. Lots of people that I went to school with would judge my DC negatively due to the way they speak. That is no more acceptable than people making negative judgments about people with Yorkshire accents.

My dad is a born and bread Black Country mama and my mum is a 'posh' Brummie. I have a Worcestershire accent (where I grew up) with a bit of East Midlands (where I live) and some Brummie/west mids thrown into the mix.

I was, actually, not that it's any of your business, with a special interest in language acquisition. I'm often to be found on these threads.

And please don't call me mate <shudder > Perhaps lay off other posters now, as it's coming across as bullying, and the irony of you correcting them is ridiculous. I'll report if you continue, as it puts people off discussion, and joining in on Mumsnet, I'm sure.

Its very normal to pick up the accent of where you live. A girl I knew had a regional UK accent but then moved to Canada, on return visits she sounds Canadian to us but says to people there she still sounds British so I guess she's ended up somewhere in between

Agreed! I have a PhD in Linguistics - everyone has an accent. You might speak with an RP accent (Received Pronunciation - i.e. BBC English), SSP (Scottish Standard Pronunciation), or other standard pronunciations for your country (American, Canadian, Australian, or South African, for example); but EVERYONE has an accent of some type.

I have a very neutral Scottish accent, from central Scotland, and as I lived in New Zealand for 3 years, I have flattened/softened some of the edges of Scottishness from it! My Dad is from South Africa (left at 13 years old, but first language was English, but spoke Afrikaans and a bit of Xhosa growing up), and my Mum is Scottish, so there were We also lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years as kids, and in the Netherlands too. My brother (as the youngest) sounds decidedly more American in some of his accent, as we went to international schools, but my sister and I had our accents more settled before we went there.

I have a colleague who has a party trick of guessing people's location histories, from their accents (they are a linguistic anthropologist), and he can definitely pick up any significant influences on accents. He reckons if you have lived somewhere, or with someone, for more than a couple of years, he can pick up on it. It's fascinating!

No worries mate, @HollaHolla has now given us some useful linguist input. Laters.

Goodness me. If you say something silly it's not picking on you to say so.

Everyone has an accent. You accent is the way that you pronounce a language based on locality, social class or other marker. Linguists study this in minute detail and would be able to classify and describe your children's accents very easily.

I expect your chidren speak in Standard Southern British English, although most people who use this accent have geographical traces in their accent too. It is the accent based on the the accent of the south of England which, because of its social standing, is also used in certain circles across the UK. RP is an older form of this accent, but is more often used now to refer to a more old-fashioned, upper class accent. (The King speaks in 21st century RP).

This guy makes lots of interesting videos about accents. Here's one about the difference between Charles and Harry's accents: s

You were a child. It wasn't your fault. You just spoke what you needed to speak.