On Sat, 19 Oct 2019 20:25:06 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
newsp.z9w6821pwdg98l@glass...
On Sat, 19 Oct 2019 19:13:21 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message
newsp.z9w4xyafwdg98l@glass...
On Wed, 09 Oct 2019 14:01:56 +0100, whisky-dave
wrote:

On Wednesday, 9 October 2019 01:07:28 UTC+1, Commander Kinsey wrote:
Things tend to be passed on, like accents.

No accents are learnt, or rather can be learnt, which is how
impersonators work.

Passed on during learning to speak.

It always amazes me that with so many people moving around, an accent
still remains in a certain city.

To a certain area yes,

I guess it's because even if 10% of people move between Glasgow to
Edinburgh, both cities still contain 90% of the original tongue, so that
gets passed to the movers.

Mind you, I don't pick up accents. I speak the way I spoke when I
learned
it as a young child. I don't change accent when I speak to different
people, but some seem to change within 10 minutes!

Accents are complicated. One weird effect you see with immigrants
is that when they move before early teenage years, they lose their
foreign accent. When they move after that, they dont.

Thats why Henry Kissinger still has quite a pronounced accent
even after 80 years, bur his younger brother doesnt. They are
only a year different in age.

I never picked up accents even when I was 6-10 and had friends with all
sorts of accents.

Thats a different issue to adopting the accent yourself.

How is it different?

One was Glaswegian and kept his accent even though everyone around him
wasn't.

Bet he didnt as an adult if he had stayed there.

I know many adults who have their original accent but have lived in a different place for decades.

And I never picked up his.

No reason why you should if he was the only one with it around you.

Well my sister would pick up the accent of a friend in 5 minutes.

So clearly both of us don't have the ability to change accent.

Bet he did eventually. It isnt instant.

I have an English accent, but I've lived all 44 years of my life in Scotland.

Yet my sister used to change accent in 5 minutes when she hung out with
someone else.

Thats again a different issue to how you talk normally.

It would stick until she hadn't spoken to that friend for a week.

she doesn't any more though, so I guess she follows the rule you set out.

Yeah, its weird that age related change.

I guess it's to do with younger people being in a learning phase, just like we can apparently learn a foreign language faster when younger. Maybe the brain just loses the ability to learn so well when older. It would certainly be useful if we kept it, for the purposes of learning to drive, studying at university etc.

but yuo'l notice that English speaking canadian sound a bit scottish,
they say abooot rather than about.

That's not Scottish, they also they things like howse. They just
carefully pronounce all the vowels.

Its much more complicated than that.

There's nothing Scottish about a Canadian.

There is with some use of words. Essentially
because so many scots chose to migrate there
and **** the natives as so many of the hairy legged
cross dressing haggis gorgers have always done.

I've never heard a Canadian speak with anything like a Scottish accent.

I'd say they were a cross between American and English.

You'd be wrong. And even the yanks vary dramatically across their country.

Well I am going by actors/actresses only. I don't know any Canadians.

They say zed not zee for example.

But with plenty of other stuff they use the english form.

Zed IS the English form.

But if you see a Canadian actor in a film, you often think they're
American.

Only if you dont have an ear for usage.

Same with NZ and Oz, you lot mostly dont
notice the obvious differences, but we do.

You dont see any of us say chilli bin, we say esky.

The words may be different, but your accents are pretty similar.