Can an accent ever be Lost ?

[Arranroots]

As far as Pam's original question is concerned, the influences on the people in her family would have been very different than they are today.

I don't know how literate they were but if they couldn't read, the "local" use of written language wouldn't have influenced the way they used language - and vice versa if they could.

In modern times, one of the biggest influences over people's use of spoken language has been radio and later television.  In the early 1980s, academics were scrambling to reach elderly people without television or radio in their homes, in an attempt to record their accents and the way they used language.  They knew that in another generation the local dialects would be altered.

On the internet you can find recordings such as that of a road sweeper in Wotton under Edge, who spoke with such a broad local accent that I can barely understand her (and I have lived here for most of my life, save a few years in the middle).

Fascinating topic.

A 

[Erato]

I do not think that a foreign accent could persist in a family for 170 years.  Perhaps a few words and expressions might be retained as family peculiarities.  Speech patterns are always affected by the surrounding speech environment, though people do vary in their ability to [perhaps unconsciously] mimic the local accent.

To take my own family as an example, my mother is English but has spent most of her adult life in the US [60 years].  She retains a slight English accent, though when she has returned to England her friends and family are shocked at how American she sounds.  My father, the son of Americans, was born in a foreign country and spent his yearly years there in a bilingual environment; he speaks American English.  My parents did not transmit any unusual accent to their children; we grew up speaking American.

My brother has lived for many years in Ireland and has lost a lot of his original accent; he sounds like an Irishman to me.  I live in a Spanish speaking country and speak Spanish fairly well.  I would never be mistaken for a native speaker but people have difficulty identifying where I am from because I have been able to pick up enough of the local accent to obscure my origins.

[IgorStrav]

I think you are right, Erato, in that some people either consciously or unconsciously "mimic" the accents which surround them, and others remain more unaffected.

I am from London, but lived for some years in Yorkshire, where everyone asked "where are you from" the moment I opened my mouth.

My children have, however, been very amused to hear me adopt a much more Yorkshire type of accent when speaking to my mother-in-law who is from Sheffield.  It's not genuine Yorkshire, of course, but I sort of feel, when speaking to her, that I need to adopt something of her way of speech.

[chris_49]

I can add some examples from famous people.

Bobby and Jack Charlton were both brought up in Ashington and to me Jack always sounded Geordie, but Bobby had one of those accents that could be from anywhere else in the North. I think it might be because Bobby moved to Manchester at an early age but Jack didn't move away till later.

Lulu found fame at a very early age and her Glasgow accent was replaced by a Southern English one, though she can "do" a Scots accent as required. Cilla Black on the other hand was somewhat older when she left Liverpool and still sounds Scouse.

Though Henry Kissinger always spoke English with a German accent, his younger brother who moved to the US at the same time apparently had no such accent.

So it might depend on what age you were when you left your home area. I knew some 18 and 19 year olds who tried to lose accents when they became students, not always successfully. (If you want to parody a Northerner tying to talk posh, the way to do it is to superimpose long A's in the "grass" words onto a Northern accent.)

 

[apanderson]

I was hoping Lulu wouldn't be amongst those you were going to mention chris!

I cringe whenever I hear her becoming 'herself' again.

Unfortunately, I get the feeling that when people try to diguise their own accents, they're somehow embarrased or ashamed of their Roots and I'm afraid that doesn't go down well with me - not for either of those reasons anyway.

Anne

[Siamese Girl]

Turning it the other way around - where did the Australian accent come from? Why didn't tall the immigrants to the new country just continue speaking how their ancestors always did?

Carole

[chris_49]

Turning it the other way around - where did the Australian accent come from? Why didn't tall the immigrants to the new country just continue speaking how their ancestors always did?

Carole

I've read somewhere (and please don't ask for refs!) that the Oz accent is based on the way the immigrants talked at the time and that it's our accents that have evolved more. Likewise the American accent with a bit of influence from Irish and German. The reason they (and the Irish and Scots) pronounce all their Rs and we don't is that we started dropping some of ours (unless you're from the West Country, m'dear) but before most Australian migration. Likewise, saying "grass" words with a long A is an affectation a mere two centuries or so old - that we northerners disdain.

"The Accents of English" by John Wells (all three volumes of it) is a mine of information but needs so much space for descriptions that there's no room for theories about origins. Sorry, I know this is the Lighter Side but it's in danger of going Totally Off Topic.

[Erato]

The American Language, by H.L Mencken, gives a good history of English in North America and how it came to deviate from British English.  Be prepared though, he is very disdainful of the mother tongue.  But that's fair enough; the English were turning up their noses at American speech within 100 years of the landing at Plymouth Rock.

[julieann1]

My Granny's Aunt and Uncle had lovely soft Ayrshire accents in their 80s.  They lived in London. I was very suprised when I began to study the family history to find that they had left Scotland in 1912, 12 and 14.  They remained close with their siblings all their lives, so I guess that helped maintain their accents.

My OH, born and bred in York, left to join the army aged 14. His Yorkshire accent his very slight - until he goes to Yorkshire or talks to a member of his family.