Keeping an accent

[fukkigucci]

Hi all,

I was born in London, and have a noons on accent. DH is American. We lived in the Middle East until a few months ago when we moved to the US.
Dd1 aged 6 has an American accent, picked up mainly from friends and from being in childcare from a young age.
Dd2, aged 2.5 has a very British accent! She's been primarily at home with me so her language skills have developed with my London accent being what she hears the most.
I'm just curious if this will stay? At what point does an accent become 'fixed?'
I'd love to hear other peoples experiences of this.

Thanks!

• weird typo there! I have a London accent!

I had an RP accent until I was 9 and we moved to Yorkshire and I picked up the local dialect. Now my accent is a mix of RP and Yorkshire.

Posted too soon.

You'll probably find your dd will pick up at least some of the local accent but will likely keep some of we current one.

I've read that accents get fixed in late teens. No idea if it's true. I have my original accent and I moved away when I was 20. Dp has lived all over the world and has a Yorkshire accent, which is where he lived from 14 to 22.

I was led to believe that whatever accent a child has at age 9 will stay with them.. Weirdly my daughter who had a fairly strong SE English accent, lost it within 6 weeks of moving to Scotland but my son who never spoke when he lived in England speaks far more properly.

She sounds so sweet with her little London accent, I don't want to her to have a horrible American accent
Ah well, part and parcel of moving here I suppose.

I moved from England to the US when I was nearly 8, and lost my accent/developed an accent within 3 months of starting school. It was entirely deliberate, because I hated being singled out for it.
Hearing a mixture of US/British/Irish English through my childhood means I can murder dialect and syntax with the best of them I have some unusual speech idiosyncrasies, but nothing that would be recognized as an accent.
One odd result of all of it, though, is that I inadvertently pick up random accents that I'm exposed to even for a very short time.

Should say *speech and pronunciation idiosyncrasies.

I even previewed. Oh for an edit option.

Some children seem more sensitive to accents than others. I'm from Durham but don't have much of an accent, just northern vowels and the odd hint of northerness. DH is French and we live in France but the DC go to an international school.

DS (14) is posh! He sounds southern/ expat and is not very good at imitating other accents.
My DDs (12 and 8) mostly sound like me. DD1 however is a chameleon -she sounds convincingly American when with American friends, totally geordie when "up north" with my family and beautifully RP when she reads aloud!
DD2's accent doesn't change involuntarily like her sister's, but her party trick is to deliberately speak in a Scottish/ Australian/ Brummie accent, just for fun.

I have an American friend from the States married to a Brit, living in France. Despite the fact that her kids spend much more time with her than her DH who works away, they all sound 100% British!

Guess you'll have to wait and see...

My DP was born in Glasgow and had a full Glaswegian accent until he was 10, when he moved to Wales. He stayed in Wales until aged 14 and developed a Welsh accent. Then he moved to Yorkshire where he still lives now and has a mild Yorkshire accent (but definitely English, iyswim).