To ask what accent your kids have?

[BackDownSouth]

Just curious to hear from other families where the children are exposed to a range of different accents from birth. I’m from Manchester (have a very strong Manchester accent, like a female Liam Gallagher), my partner is from Eastern Europe, and we’ll be raising our baby in Liverpool.

Is the baby likely to pick up a mixture of me and my partner’s accent, or will they pick up the Scouse accent from nursery/school and their friends? I’d rather they picked up the local accent just for the sake of fitting in. Me and my partner both find the “Oooh, you’re not from ‘round ‘ere, are ya?” exhausting 😂

Maternity leave has me bored so I’m thinking about this a lot!

I'm Welsh, partners Irish- living in NI

My nearly 6 uear old had a very neutral accent up until recently but has taken to speaking English with a distinctive Irish lilt and Welsh with a heavy Welsh accent - presumably due to influences from both families, I love it

My 18 month old doesn't have an accent yet

My DS went to nursery in a different place to where we lived (was easier to place him there near where I was studying). The accent there is different and he started picking it up. So I think your DC will probably develop local accents based on exposure at nursery, school, clubs etc.

My parents are scousers, I was born further south so don't have their accent. My DS is Welsh and he speaks very nicely - better than me 😂

Proper sarf London and I hate it. I have to bite my tongue daily.

I haven't got a strong accent but a mix of a couple of different areas where I live people think I'm not local and talk softly (despite only having ever moved within a 15 mile radius all my life). DC is probably even more diluted, a cross between mine/family/school.

They'll pick up the local accent but probably not strongly as it's not reinforced at home. That's my experience anyway.

DH and I speak RP. Our kids went to an American school. One speaks RP and the other has a definite American twang.

I think the kids will end up with a mish-mash. My mum is from Wigan, my dad had a standard RP accent. I was brought up in the West Midlands and have an accent best described as mangled RP (my dad would roll in his grave to hear how I drop my consonants). I have Wigan vowels on some words, West Midlands / Welsh borders on others.

I thought I had no real accent until I went to university and was taken for Welsh by a posh Londoner.

I imagine your baby will have a Liverpudlian accent once they start school, OP. I live in Essex and when my DC were small it was funny hearing the Eastern European kids with their Eastern European accents but by year 6 they were speaking like something out of TOWIE 🤦‍♀️😬

Having said that my DC apparently have a more diluted Essex accent as I’m not from round these parts. Their friends call them posh but all I can hear is Gemma Collins 🤣😆😭

I love my accent. It is very neutral living below the landsker in Pembrokeshire. My husband is from Swansea and my luckily my children sound just like me.

My parents are/were both Welsh - my mum has a Cardiff accent, but my dad was RP. I am married to a brummie, who has a light accent. I mostly have a neutral English accent, but use some Welsh pronunciations (mostly words ending in wn, eg shown, and words with an r at or towards the end - tour, weird). Dc just speak with a very neutral English accent - not plummy, just no regional accent, We live in an area that doesn’t really have its own associated accent, so I guess this is part of the reason.

DD born in UK, I'm Dutch, DH is British. Now we live on NL - DD has British accent (I think it has a bit of Nottingham twang to it) and speaks Dutch with a Northern NL twang. DH speaks Dutch with an English twang. Apparently I sound Mancunian. Nice mash up in our house!

I'm irish , dh is cornish and we live in Ireland and my ds has a mix of English and Irish in his accent. With certain phrases that he will say stronger in one accent 🤣 as he grows older I'm guessing that the Irish will become more dominant with just a cornish twang

Glasgow but less broad than mine. When DD was a toddler I read her the Glasgow version of the Gruffalo and she patted me sympathetically on the arm and said 'i can't understand that kind of Scottish mummy, but it was nice anyway'. Clearly I'm common as muck!

I think it can really vary depending on your child’s personality and how they identify. I’ve know several pairs of siblings with different accents (RP English & American, Geordie & London). I think a lot of children do end up speaking with the accent of their parents or using different accents depending on circumstances.

I'm from Sheffield but moved to Germany before my kids could talk. We speak English at home, but they speak German at school.

Their English is virtually accent-less, with a very slight occasional American twang they have picked up from TV shows! Although they do use Yorkshire phrases like referring to their evening meal as "tea" and afterwards we have "pudding". Their other English-speaking friends (Aussies and Americans are very amused by it).

Their accents and mine slide depending on who they are talking to. DS's will shift mid sentence. It is quite comical.

Very true, look at Jacob Rees-Mogg - he has a ver ver posh accent but Annunziata Rees-Mogg is just normal. It must depend on who you mix with/schools etc.

I’d guess your DC will have a scouse accent but not super strong. I’m from the south but live in Liverpool, DH is from here. Both DC gradually pick up the accent, DS in particular sounded more like me when he was little. Both have an accent now but even at 12 I head DS’s friends have much stronger ones.

Yes I think your child will probably sound more Liverpool than anything if they go to school there. My DC's school friends have parents from all over the world and the kids just sound like locals (some even have a bit of a farmery twang because we're in the SW which is sweet).

I'm foreign, DH is not and DC just sounds local to us/RP. It really does depend on who they spend the most of their time with.

This is going to be my kids once they start secondary 🫠

I noticed that my DC1 (born and raised in London) had some northern sounding vowels at about 5-6 years old. His dad is a scouser ( not much of an accent these days, but so then) and his class teacher was from Newcastle, and I think the 2 things combined affected his accent. Once he had a Londoner for a teacher, he dropped the northern vowels!
I notice that lots of children speak with their parents accent until they are about 7, at which point they start to talk more like their peers. Although children from another country seem to pick up English with an English accent, not with their parents' accents.

Our son has a North London accent, he has a hairing impairment so now we no longer live in London I am curious as to how his accent will be impacted. Our daughters only little, but she has a local Swedish accent when speaking both Swedish and English, but when she speaks Urdu she sounds very native Urdu, likely because the sounds are very different.

DH and I are both Scottish and have a fairly neutral accent. I'm from Glasgow originally so can go a bit weegie and DH is more Northern. DS1 and DD are pretty Midlothian but DS2 often sounds English. He's autistic so I know the accent thing can be a thing. He'll use Scottish slang and it sounds a bit weird. He's 14 now and his friends struggle to believe he's never lived in England!

A strong welsh one.

and no, nothing like Gavin and Stacey