Why do accents change

At birth, we could all have the same accents. After age seven, your accent is unlikely to change. We often try to change our accent on purpose. Sometimes our accent changes a bit, subconsciously. Accents are being diluted.

Nowadays accents are loved and embraced. Give us feedback. Read Next View. Le Comptoir industriel. Black Squirrel Chalet. La Halte Montaigne. In Thai, however, aspirated and unaspirated p are as different as English l and r.

Using one in place of the other completely changes what word you've uttered for example, from 'forest' to 'split' , just as replacing l with r in English would change lip to rip.

Because English has different rules for the use of aspirated and unaspirated p , an English speaker learning Thai will make the same sorts of mistakes that a Japanese speaker makes in using English l and r. It's not only individual sounds that can cause a person's speech to sound foreign. Sound patterns also differ from language to language. For instance, an English syllable may begin or end with a cluster of consonants, as with the str and ngths of the word strengths. In Japanese, on the other hand, a syllable contains only one consonant followed by one vowel - as in ma or ki.

The one exception is that a syllable may also end with an n , as in san. For this reason, pronouncing English consonant clusters is hard for Japanese speakers, and they may produce a vowel sound between the consonants in a cluster.

Finally, sentence structure differs from language to language as well. In Russian, for example, it's not necessary to have a connecting word like is in the sentence The house is very large. For that matter, no word corresponding to English the would appear in the Russian version of this sentence either. But a native Russian speaker learning English who says only House very large will sound distinctly foreign.

Sometimes two languages will allow the same sentence form, but in different situations. English, for example, allows a word or phrase to be moved to the front of the sentence in certain contexts: l Spaghetti I like but lasagna I hate. This same word order is allowed in Yiddish; the difference is that Yiddish allows it to be used in a much broader range of contexts.

So a native speaker of Yiddish, seeing that English has the same word-order possibility, might say something like: 2 My brother has no idea how to save money.

A house he's buying now. Here, He's buying a house now becomes A house he's buying now , just as in l I like spaghetti becomes Spaghetti I like.

Both l and 2 would sound fine in Yiddish, but only l sounds normal in English; in 2 the speaker seems to have an accent. It depends on whether we're talking about first- or second-language learning. Native speakers of a language do tend to master some of its sounds before others. In English, p, m, n, h, and w are among the first consonants acquired by children, while z, j, v, and the two th sounds as in think and this are among the last to be mastered.

But all of the sounds of a language are generally acquired before puberty by a native speaker. Typically, it's only non-native learners that have long-term difficulty with a sound.

When you learn a second language, you may have difficulty with sounds that don't occur in your native language; for example, some languages have trilled r 's, 'clicks' made with the tongue as air is taken in, or sounds made much farther back in the throat than English sounds.

Surprisingly, though, the hardest sounds to learn may be those that are similar to, but just a bit different from, sounds in your native language. But is it? Because it is perceived to be a measure of socioeconomic status. Chapman takes me through the sound diagnostic, a verbal test to check how my speech varies from RP or standard-neutral English. I read through the phonemic alphabet, a system that allows people to learn how to pronounce English sounds in RP.

I begin by pronouncing words with vowels of the long and short variety, then diphthongs, before moving on to consonants, including plosives and fricatives. The verdict is that my accent gets particularly Manc when I am pronouncing long vowels. I have got my work cut out for me if I ever want to present on Radio 4. Should I start practising?

Phillips says that having more people with regional accents in powerful positions would help. I am convinced.