Is it natural to pick up an accent?

But it turns out that a wandering accent isn't a flaw, or some bizarre act of mockery; it's part of normal human social behavior, and it seems to have some pretty amazing psychological reasons behind it.

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Can you naturally pick up an accent?

Research has shown that accents become permanent around the age of 12 years old. That being said, it is possible for accents to change over time or for adults to develop a subtle accent after living in a foreign country for an extended period of time.

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Why do I subconsciously pick up accents?

Though it can be embarrassing, this tendency is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, psychologists believe it signals high levels of empathy, and a 2013 study found that this kind of unconscious imitation actually tends to make conversational partners feel more positively about the speaker.

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Are you born with an accent or do you learn it?

From the moment they're born, babies are, in their own way, communicating in the language of their families: Even before they have words, they have accents.

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Is your accent genetic?

So a family that has moved from one part of the world to another may seem to have a family-specific accent, but that trait is a result of the family's shared environment—not their shared genetics.

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Can You Develop A Perfect/Native Accent In A Foreign Language? Should You Want To?

39 related questions found

Why did I develop an accent?

Accents develop and change over time as people tend to live and communicate in specific and delineated communities. Accent is the social marker that signals either affiliation with a group or distance from a group.

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How did Australia get their accent?

Australian English can be described as a new dialect that developed as a result of contact between people who spoke different, mutually intelligible, varieties of English. The very early form of Australian English would have been first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the early colony in Sydney.

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What is the Australian accent closest to?

Australian English is most similar to British English in spelling and sentence construction, although its accent and vocabulary are very distinct from the UK.

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Do people with ADHD copy accents?

This practice is known as ADHD masking and is especially common in women with ADHD. One type of ADHD masking — known as mirroring — involves intentionally or unintentionally mimicking the speech, movements, or behaviors of someone else.

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Why do I naturally mimic accents?

According to a 2010 study by a research group at the University of California, Riverside, people subconsciously mimic other accents due to a phenomenon called "the chameleon effect". The chameleon effect describes our human instinct to “empathise and affiliate” with other people.

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Why do I pick up accents so easily?

Human beings are constantly imitating each other, copying everything from each other's facial expressions, mannerisms, even our postures. Researchers at The University of California, Riverside, found we also imitate speech patters and inflections. That is we have the capacity to imitate accents.

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What is the easiest accent to pick up?

Option 1: the American accent

The most popular English accent of them all. Spread around the world by American cinema, music, television and more than 350 million North Americans (including Canadians, eh), this is the easiest accent for most people to understand, whether native speakers or non-native speakers.

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At what age do you develop an accent?

Comparing the two results, it is estimated that children start to recognize different accents at the age of 5 and start to develop their own accents. For that reason, it is recommended to increase children's exposure to different accents between age 5 to 7 for them to develop an unique accent that fits themselves.

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Will I lose my accent if I move to America?

Yes, even your accent can and often does change when you move location or start spending a lot of time in a new environment. This can also be true for people starting university or work for the first time, where they interact and are influenced by new circumstances and peer groups.

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What is a thick Australian accent called?

Strine, also spelled Stryne /ˈstraɪn/, describes a broad accent of Australian English.

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What is an Australian accent called?

In Australia, this dialect is sometimes called Strine /ˈstɹɑɪn/ (or "Strayan" /ˈstɹæɪən/, a shortening of the word Australian), and a speaker of the dialect may be referred to as an Ocker.

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What accent do Australian people have?

There are different variations of the Australian accent. Dr Gawne describes one variation as the "broad accent... [which is] your good, Aussie, ocker accents." Another variation is the "general accent, which is actually the majority of Australian English speakers."

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Why is Australian accent so deep?

Australian English often contains higher levels of nasal resonance to oral resonance. Resonance refers to voice acoustics and is determined by where the bulk of sound vibration from the voice is reinforced in the your face.

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Why do Australians sound more British?

Early European settlers to Australia — many of whom were convicts — were from all over Great Britain and Ireland, and their speech patterns blended to form the new Australian accent.

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Why do Australians sound the way they do?

According to Richards, the beginning of our Australian accent emerged following the arrival of European settlers in 1788. "It emerged from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England," he said.

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Why do accents disappear when singing?

An article in Mental Floss cites linguist David Crystal's explanation, which is that, “a song's melody cancels out the intonations of speech, followed by the beat of the music canceling out the rhythm of speech.” Thus, many of the features that give away your speaking accent are not possible to reproduce when you're ...

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Will I get an accent if I move to Australia?

Sure, you'll notice changes to your own accent after moving to Australia. Sometimes these changes are subtle, but it's generally best to start learning the Aussie twang early on. This will help you embrace it before the accent is too far ingrained in your everyday speech.

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