I’ve been slowly watching The Up Series on Netflix streaming for the last few weeks. Well, most of the series. For some reason Neflix doesn’t stream 7 Up, 7 Plus Seven and 35 Up. Right now, I’m on 49 Up, which was heretofore the only of The Up Series I’d seen. I got to the Nick section and as they were recapping his life as recorded in the previous documentaries, I realized something: his British accent is fading. Later, I mentally replayed the Paul section; I realized Paul sounded much more Australian than British. He’s definitely got that twang. This makes sense, as Nick has been Stateside since before 28 Up, and Paul has been in Australia since before 7 Plus Seven.
I wrote yesterday about how the language learning “window” of the brain starts to narrow around puberty. Unsurprisingly, the thickness of one’s native accent is also affected by age. Someone who learns to speak a second language at age 25 will speak it with a thicker version of their native accent at age 50 than someone who learned the second language at age 12, or 5, or 2. This is why my Mexican-born grandfather, who learned English in his mid-20s, to this day, has a much thicker Mexican accent than the children of many immigrants who learned English in Elementary school, or younger. This age-accent phenomenon isn’t limited to speaking a second language. It also applies to regional speech of the same language. A 35 year old South African who relocates to Canada for the remainder of his life, will likely carry an identifiable South African accent English speech with him for the rest of his life. His 15 year old cousin might find her accent more influenced by Canadian English by the time she’s an adult. And his 5 year old son might reach adulthood bearing scant trace of his South African accent, if he bears the accent at all.
This isn’t new. Most of us know adults who speak with varying degrees of accented English and when we learn of their backstories, the folks with thicker accents tend to be those who made contact with our language group later rather than sooner. As I noted, Paul sounds much more Australian to me than British, so I assume he achieved accent assimilation quickly and thoroughly. Nick still sounds British, but you have to listen fairly carefully. I hear it more with the clarity of his “T’s” than the short “A” sounds (cat, plan, glass)* or the soft “Rs” that tend to be the easiest for Americans to spot. Are the dental plosives (t/d) the last fade for the Brits when they cross the pond? My brother-in-law is a native of England. He’s been among American military for the better part of 20 years and over here, continually, for about 12 or 13. He sounds British to me, but mostly because of his slang; his accent has definitely become more Americanized. There are times when I think he sounds more like someone from Brooklyn. (Or what this Texan who grew up watching movies and TV shows about New York assumes native Brooklynites sound like.) What I’m curious about is how long does it take the average person to “dilute” his or her native accent when they’ve immersed into a second language community?
* I hope to find a way to include the International Phonetic Alphabet in this blog at some point, because my own phonetic descriptions drive me crazy with their crudeness. … also, technically, the vowel sounds in “cat”, “plan” and “glass” are not short vowel sounds, but I’m referring to them as such because it made sense to me when I learned them that way in First Grade. My apologies to Peter Ladefoged, wherever he is!
