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!

South England RP. A lot of people say he sounds posh, but I think he just hasn't really got an accent. He does speak properly though.

I have one who speaks with a neutral southern accent (gets called posh at school, as did I) and one who is veering into MLE, much like DH.

DSS has an unusual combination of Yorkshire and south London, due to the location and background of his parents 😁

Everyone has an accent though. RP is an accent.

I have an estuary accent, H has a reasonably soft Mancunion accent - Tess Daly is the nearest equivalent I can think of. DC1, born in London but educated entirely in Manchester sounds like H. DC2 sounds like Mark E. Smith.

I guess they have my accent when talking English, which is a kind of Suffolky Wiltshiry mix, though my oldest can also do a perfect Ralli-English accent (Finns speaking English accent, rally drivers well known for it).
In Finnish I guess they speak with the local accent. I can't really distinguish between accents in Finnish unless they are so different as to be dialects.

Sibling accents can also vary depending on how old they were when they moved house to a different area or country. An older child is less likely to change accent… though I can’t remember now the average age at which accents tend to become more fixed.

children tend to pick up local accent. I’m northern but live in the south, and my kids have a southern (south London) accent.

We live in south Scotland. My dh is Scottish but accent is quite soft, my accent is a mix of north and south England. Ds sounds English with a few Scottish accent words (he went to English nursery until 3), DD sounds English but with a few more Scottish accent words. I'm hoping both will become more Scottish in time.

My DS has an English accent - no idea what type as we live in London and he was born here. Parents are from NI & Republic of Ireland. Three different accents in our house - there is a lot of imitating each other!

I’m in the southwest with a strong accent, ex is from London, however all 4 of my children have no accent at all! Yet we never made a big deal about the way they spoke.

English in Ireland and they all have very Irish regional accents

Hmm. My children have London accents I suppose but they spent most of their youth on the Isle of Wight so maybe it's that (is there an IOW accent)? They certainly don't have mine (American). I'm really bad at distinguishing accents unless very obvious (my DD is st Durham and I really like listening to the locals up there). I remember my DD used to pick up American pronunciations when watching those kid's TV shows aimed at tweens.

I'm Irish and DH is Norwegian; DC are bilingual, we live in the North West of England (rural area). DS (8) has a mix. A lot of the time he just sounds a bit well-spoken Northern English, but he slips sometimes into a sort of...speed and sound that I can say he definitely gets from DH. I occasionally hear a twang of Irish. DD (5) is weirdly more Irish sounding when she has those moments.

At the moment, I couldn't say how they'd end up sounding. But we're moving back to Norway very soon, so I'm going to assume they'll end up sounding more Norwegian as they're still only young.

It’s not possible to have no accent?

@Ladybird69
By this I mean I’m pretty sure your DC would be identifiable as English from their accent. They wouldn’t be mistaken for Americans or Australians etc?

There definitely is an IoW accent (it’s technically a West Country accent) but you don’t hear it all that much these days.

Impossible. Unless you have four robots

My parents were Geordies (my Dad very broad) but I grew up in Brighton so have a neutral southern English accent - I am not sure if that is RP. I understand that I had a Geordie accent until school age (I used to say My Mam) but that was teased out of me pretty fast.

My children have grown up in London and speak with an even more RP accent than I do.

School will be the biggest impact on your child's accent. We live manchester and my children have very heavy manchester accents. I am not from Manchester

DD has a local accent (we live SW London), I have quite a strong Geordie accent and DH a softer Mancunian accent. I’m quite glad she’s gone local as I don’t know how that mix might have turned out.

My siblings and I all grew up in South London, with parents / grandparents all born in or near Liverpool, but parents had lost their accents mostly (my Mum because she moved south aged 13, my Dad because he was told in his early 20s that he'd never get anywhere unless he lost it) but we all used some northern words at home - we had pumps, not trainers, and tea, and were told not to moider the cat. We all ended up RP (from school) and souf London in code switching in different circumstances to avoid trouble. My sons, born and brought up in London, are also RP but the odd northern word / vowel from home, oddly enough. 10 yr old told my sister to stop moidering him when she ruffled his hair over Christmas!

My kids have a mixed accent of the local area and us, that shifts with their moods and who they're talking to.

I grew up being told by teachers that it was great we were an area with 'no accent' (what was called Midwestern American Newcaster accent). I knew it was nonsense then, but it was even more obvious when I moved to England. It's been a couple decades, and I still get people go on at me about my accent. I had it earlier this month at work with a higher up go on about how 'strange' I sound.

My children all have well spoken southern accent.I have noticed grandchild dropping Ts so have been correcting by repeating word with emphasis on T .

DH just sounds well spoken (he's from Cambridgeshire) and I'm from Yorkshire, but DS has a definite West Country leaning from his mates at school. No Yorkshire whatsoever!

Mine is relatively RP, husband has a neutralish Kent accent....daughter sounds American. No idea (probs YouTube though).