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 English living in NI. (DH and his family are from here) My children have an NI accent but pronounce some words with an English twang.

I don't have a strong Scottish accent but when teaching in England I had to put on a bit of an accent.
I'd been taught French with a decent French accent but had to say things like "Oovrai la pawte" as they spoke French with their own accent.

Patrick Stewart

Actors used to be told (I'm not sure if they still are) to use RP because 1) it is understandable and 2) it is easier to get from RP to a lot of accents.

@TheOtherAgentJohnson
Love the way Wiganers have a scouse twang on one side and Lancashire on the other. Particularly the way the words like "too" and "brown" are pronounced.

It's an incredibly specific set of vowel sounds, and I actually can't do them properly. I wish I could do my grandparents' accent, it was wonderful. My mum's is not as strong.

All the posters saying they have RP accents, 🤣

Okayyyyy

Why does that sound unbelievable?

Because approx 3% of the population speak with a RP accent yet it seems they are all on this thread 🤣

In fairness, MN is not exactly representative of the UK population as a whole.

That is simply not true. It is probably more accurate to say that MN attracts aspirational posters.

Have you missed the threads from the numerous posters who are living in poverty and from paycheck to paycheck?

Apart from that statistically the population in the UK alone is 68.3 million and MN has nine million users and 700K per month. It does not correspond with the number of posters on this thread who claim to have a RP accent.

Maybe they are thinking a ‘normal’ posh accent is RP?

Speaking with RP does not automatically make one rich.

Quite a few posters on MN live in countries that are not the UK.

Realistically, the only way to know for sure would be to get all the poster who claim to have RP to record their voices. But they won’t - so one can believe them or not.

Accents have changed quite a lot over the last century. I think the Princess of Wales speaks with modern RP. I doubt that many people speak the way that QEII used to back in the 50s. So it depends whether the PoW speaks with a “normal” posh accent or whether you would say it is RP?

Therefore, the number of people posting who claim to speak like Kate Middleton is nothing short of delusional.

She speaks with a posher accent than William or Harry. It is a deliberately acquired accent.

Mine fitted in with the masses at school (as I had to do) in Sarf London and then took the bits I inherited from my Grandmother - that come out mostly when I'm exceedingly pissed off - to sound incredibly posh by the time they finished university.

I suppose they heard me code switching throughout their childhood and followed suit.

My parents were both from the north-west but I grew up elsewhere. I now have a "neutral" accent with northern vowels. DH is from the south.

Our son has a southern accent with southern vowels. When he's been on sports trips with people from other parts of the country they think he's posh ;)

A while ago I found a website where you said how you pronounce certain things. On the basis of that it said I could be from Cheshire or (the Scouse bit of) North Wales which is probably about right. It said my son could be from anywhere from Canterbury to Bournemouth :) which is also fair. DH didn't do it.

I'm Scottish and my partner is from the south east, which is where we live. Before going to nursery she said a couple of words with a Scottish twang but that is now long gone and she has a proper South East accent, absolutely no hint of a Scottish accent at all. So I'm teaching her all the Scottish words for things to make up for it haha

I’m sure she has had public speaking coaching but her accent is pretty much like every ex public school girl/boy 🤷‍♀️

It’s reportedly posher than William and Harry’ do very much a deliberately acquired accent.

North London - I've been equally told I sound 'cockney' and 'posh' and used to think I sounded the latter but TBH I sound pretty standard North London.

DH is public school educated and sounds quite 'posh', kids, especially oldest, sound fairly 'posh', their cousins who live down the road sound more North London. Can only ascribe this to the fact mine went to a Jewish primary and their cousins went to somewhere more mixed so mine absorbed a much more generically middle class accent from their peers that's stuck with them even at a much more mixed secondary (which we wanted them to go to rather than Jewish secondary so they had a wider social experience).

Why must that mean it was deliberately acquired? Her speaking voice, rather than when she is public speaking, doesn’t sound particularly “posh” to me. She just sounds like every other girl who went to Marlborough or somewhere similar to me 🤷‍♀️

Compare her to Pippa.
Her accent is far more pinched.

Anyway Kate Middleton a bit of a red herring as she has had lessons in speaking.

The point is the number of posters claiming to have a RP accent is not statistically feasible.

I am sure she has had some voice training. If she sounds more clipped, it may be that the people she spends time with sound like that.

I also expect that William and Harry have toned down their RP a bit. Don’t some people say that William is a bit mockney?

It is statistically feasible though. There are 249 posts on the thread, so that is a sample size <249 as some posters have posted more than once. That’s a tiny sample size. The sample isn’t random as people are self selecting whether they post or not.