New Accents

Just a month after Meghan Markle became the Duchess of Sussex upon marrying Prince Harry, already it's making the news that she seems to be adopting a British accent. I did watch the clip and she hasn't - she's just got a slightly British cadence to her speech, but her pronunciation still sounds American to me.

It's always fascinated me how some people can be really good with accents and others not at all. My best friend is on one end of that spectrum - she lived in New Zealand for six years and has no hint of a Kiwi accent, although she does now use a lot of New Zealand English. On the opposite end of that spectrum, two of my friends from the UK moved to Florida in secondary school and within six months had completely lost their British accents, although they still retained a lot of British English words and phrases for a long time.

So I think it would be completely understandable if the Duchess of Sussex did develop a British accent - she lives in the UK now and is surrounded by mostly British people. It would only be natural for her to pick up the accent. Some people pick up accents quickly, without even meaning to. And really, I don't think there's anything wrong with just wanting to, either, whether that's to fit in or just for fun.

I can pick up a new accent just by visiting a place for a week or so. My brain just wants to imitate what it's hearing - pronunciation is also usually the first thing I pick up when learning a new language for this reason. My grammar and vocabulary will be terrible, but I will sound really good speaking it. My brain just wants to imitate what I'm hearing around me. Sometimes this gets absorbed into my already rather hotch-potch idiolect and sometimes it's temporary.

Bustle has a really nice article (here) about 'wandering accents' and what they mean. Apparently imitating someone's accent is an act of empathy and just means that you want to understand and be understood.  And apparently you pick up accents more easily and learn languages better if you're a musician - well, that explains a lot. Thank you mum and dad for violin, piano, and singing lessons when I was a kid.

There is a downside, however - sometimes people think you're mocking them or will mock you for it (like people did to Madonna when she moved to the UK). I often feel really self-conscious about it for this reason and will really only speak normally (well, normally for me, at least) around my boyfriend and my best friend. Usually I'll try to be more aware of how I'm speaking so at least I don't do it by accident. I began speaking more precisely when I taught English in Japan, so that my lower-level students could understand me more easily. Thus, any accent I speak in tends to be a bit over-enunciated, including my 'native' one.

This actually results in me sometimes being asked where I'm from, even in my home country. Oddly, most people who ask me this most often think I'm from Russia, although I have no idea why. I've never even been there and I've done the Ancestry DNA thing - I have no Russian heritage, either. Although I was pleased to discover that I'm a lot more Celtic than I had thought. Perhaps I should learn Welsh or Irish next, then?