• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Why Some People Lose Their Accents But Others Don’t

May 6, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

The ConversationThe way a person speaks is an intrinsic part of their identity. It’s tribal, marking a speaker as being from one social group or another. Accents are a sign of belonging as much as something that separates communities.

Yet we can probably all think of examples of people who seem to have “lost” their regional or national accent and of others whose accent stays firmly in place.

Advertisement

Given the personal and social importance of how someone speaks, why would anyone’s
accent change?

You may think of your accent as a physical part of who you are – but a conscious or subconscious desire to fit in can influence the way you speak, whether you want it to or not. Research has shown a person’s accent will move towards that of the group of speakers with which they identify at some stage in their lives. Accents are a fluid feature of speech. If someone moves from Australia to the US to work, for example, they will probably at least modify their accent, either consciously or unconsciously.

This may be out of a need or desire to be more clearly understood and to be accepted in a new community. They might also want to avoid ridicule for the way that they speak. Over a quarter of senior professionals from working-class backgrounds in the UK have been singled out for their accents at work.

A sense of belonging

For people whose accents do shift, the way they speak may be less important to their sense of identity, or their identity with a social or professional group may be more pressing.

Advertisement

Even before we are born, we are exposed to the speech patterns of those around us. Studies of newborns have found that it is possible to detect tonal aspects specific to their speech communities from their cries. To have our needs met, we are more or less programmed to fit in. We produce vocalisations that sound like they belong to our caregivers’ communities. We progress through various stages of speech development that result in us having speech patterns similar to those around us.

Man and woman sitting on a balcony having a conversation

The way you talk is an important part of who you are. Image credit: Look Studio/Shutterstock.com

Emerging into society, we mix with people outside our limited social group and are exposed to more patterns of speech. This can result in a child’s accent changing rapidly to be accepted by their peers. A colleague of mine from the US, for example, who works in the UK, told me how their child had begun to speak with a standard southern English accent since starting school. The parents were now being taught by their child to speak “correct” English.

A strong identity

For others whose accent does not seem to change, it could be because they feel secure in their identity, and their accent is very much part of that identity – or that preserving the difference is valuable to them. They may not even be aware of how much their accent means to them. If a speaker has what most deem to be a desirable accent, they might not want to lose the advantage by modifying it.

Whether consciously or not, people have at least some control over their speech when they move home. But brain damage or stroke can, in rare cases, result in foreign accent syndrome (FAS). This syndrome results from physical changes that are not under the speaker’s control. Some areas in the brain are associated with producing and perceiving language, and we also have brain regions that control the motor aspects of speech.

Advertisement

If these are damaged, speakers may lose the ability to speak at all or experience changes in the way they articulate sounds because the motor area is sending different instructions to the vocal organs. An extreme example, reported recently in The Metro, describes how a woman, Abby French, from Texas, US, woke up after surgery with foreign accent syndrome.

French claimed that she sounded Russian, Ukrainian or Australian at any one time. Listeners tend to guess at the accent they think the changed speech sounds most like.

In some cases, listeners might discriminate against a person with FAS as they believe them to be foreigners, which shows how much our speech can influence how others treat us. It’s no wonder many people unconsciously protect themselves by adapting their speech to those around them.The Conversation

Jane Setter, Professor of Phonetics, University of Reading

Advertisement

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Facemasks and sanitizer as French kids go back to school
  2. Afghan women’s soccer team arrives in Pakistan – information minister
  3. U.S. consumer confidence hits seven-month low as near-term economic outlook dims
  4. Rare Quasicrystal Found Unexpectedly In Nebraska Sand Dune

Source Link: Why Some People Lose Their Accents But Others Don’t

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • What Is Trump’s “Gold Standard Science” Actually About?
  • Suspect Accused Of Fowl Play In Scrubbed Australian Rocket Launch Is Innocent
  • Two Yangtze Finless Porpoises Have Been Returned To The Wild For First Time In China
  • Sun Filtered By Dust In Florida As Haboob The Size Of 48 States Approaches The US
  • What Is The Alaska Triangle?
  • “Egyptian Blue” Was A Color Lost To History. Finally, We Can Make It Again
  • Satellite Image Shows A Human Head Peering Out Of The Landscape In Canada
  • Video Shows Physicists Achieve “Impossible” Feat Of Rolling A Ball Vertically
  • Octopus Survives Suspected Predator Attack And Regrows Limbs – But Ends Up With 9, Not 8
  • These Are All The NASA Missions That Trump Wants To Cancel
  • Cells Outside The Brain Show Signs Of Memory And “Learning” For The First Time
  • 50,000-Year-Old Collagen Could Lead Us To Hippo-Sized Wombats In The Fossil Record
  • World’s Smallest Otter Species Rediscovered In Nepal After 185 Years
  • 2-Million-Year-Old Teeth Reveal Sex Of Prehistoric Human-Like Ape For The First Time
  • In 2023, A Megatsunami Shook The World Every 90 Seconds For 9 Days. Now, We Can See Why
  • NASA Astronauts Share Spectacular Images Of Lightning Over The US
  • Over 10 Percent Of US Electricity Could Be Supplied By Geothermal Energy, Says USGS
  • Why South Africa Has Been Lifting Out The Ocean By Up To 2 Millimeters Each Year
  • Why Are There So Many Shoes Hanging From Power Lines?
  • We Finally Know Where Humans And Neanderthals Hooked Up
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version