Accents are a fluid feature of speech and can move towards that of a group of speakers with which one identifies, says phonetics professor Jane Setter, University of Reading.
is an intrinsic part of their identity. It’s tribal, marking a speaker as being from one social group or another. Accents are a sign of belonging as much as something that separates communities.
This may be out of a need or desire to be more clearly understood and to be accepted in a new community. They might also want to avoid ridicule for the way that they speak. Over a quarter of senior professionals from working-class backgrounds in the UK have been singled out for their accents at work.For people whose accents do shift, the way they speak may be less important to their sense of identity, or their identity with a social or professional group may be more pressing.
Emerging into society, we mix with people outside our limited social group and are exposed to more patterns of speech. This can result in a child’s accent changing rapidly to be accepted by their peers.Commentary: Why the interest over TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi’s nationality and how Singaporean he is? Whether consciously or not, people have at least some control over their speech when they move home. But brain damage or stroke can, in rare cases, result in foreign accent syndrome. This syndrome results from physical changes that are not under the speaker’s control. Some areas in the brain are associated with producing and perceiving language, and we also have brain regions that control the motor aspects of speech.
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