Changing Accents: How and Why Do People Lose or Pick up the Way They Speak Upon Emigrating?

A person's speech pattern is essential to their individuality and closely associated with their social identity. Accents are often used to distinguish one community from another while also serving as a sign of belonging.

However, there are instances where individuals may have seemingly lost their original regional or national accents while others retain them strongly. Considering the importance of speech in personal and social contexts, it begs the question: what prompts a person's accent to change?

(Photo: Unsplash/Leonardo Toshiro Okubo)
Changing Accents: How and Why Do People Lose or Pick Up the Way They Speak Upon Emigrating?

Accents Give a Sense of Belongingness

The way a person speaks may seem like an inherent part of their identity, but the desire to fit in with a particular social group can have a significant impact on one's accent, whether consciously or unconsciously, Jane Setter, a professor of Phonetics at the University of Reading wrote in her article in The Conversation.

As research has shown, accents are a fluid feature of speech that can shift toward the group of speakers with which a person identifies at some point in their life. For instance, someone who moves to a new country or community may need to modify their accent to be more easily understood and accepted.

People may sometimes change their accents because their identity with a social or professional group is more crucial than how they speak. A 2009 study has revealed that even before birth, people are exposed to the speech patterns of those around them.

From the baby's earliest cries, they attempt to produce sounds like those of their caregivers' communities. As people age, they go through various stages of speech development, leading to speech patterns similar to those around them.

However, as humans move into society and encounter individuals from different social groups, their accents can shift rapidly to match their peers.

For example, a US-born child who moved to the UK had begun to speak with a standard southern English accent since starting school, with the parents now learning to say "correct" English from their child. In many cases, an individual's accent is not simply a physical feature but a dynamic aspect of their identity that changes to meet the needs of their social environment.

Accents Change Could Vary From One Person to Another

In 2017, a study by McGill University linguist Morgan Sonderegger and colleagues examined how much people's accents can change over the medium term, which falls between short-term and long-term change.

As per their press release, the analysis demonstrated that while large daily fluctuations in each sound variable were common, longer-term changes over weeks to months occurred in a minority of cases. The study showed the dynamics of accent change within individual speakers, even in settings of intense social contact, are highly complex and ruled out any simple path from social interaction to change in a person's accent over their lifetime.

Sonderegger's research suggests that some individuals are more susceptible to accent change than others, indicating that people differ in how subject they are to change over time. While some people's accents change entirely, others never "lose" their accents when they move to a new place.