This Is This

As they get older, people adopt the accents of their childhood.

This is a funny one, but after the age of retirement (sixty five for men, sixty for women), their accents revert to the ones they had between the ages of eight and fourteen.

Exhibit

My dad (exits are here and here)

Born in Liverpool between the wars, Ted Jones never sounded like a Scouser to me when I was a kid, but as he’s gotten older, it has crept up on him, stalking his larynx like a vengeful lover. One day I’m going to call him up and he’ll sound like George Harrison in Hard Day’s Night with an accent thick enough to strip paint.

Don’t get me wrong, la, it’s gear.

I used to think my theory was down to was Expat Syndrome. You know where people who leave their homeland become caricatures of their countrymen.

I grew up (and I use that term loosely) in the States and France, so I’ve heard people wax lyrical into their sixties and gins and tonics about baked beans with accents that were throwbacks to Ealing comedies.

But what about where people haven’t live somewhere since they were kids and then move to a different region of the same country and start talking with the accent they grew up with? That’s where my theory kicks in.

Oprah sounds more southern all the time, and has ditched the long Madison Avenue vowels for the clipped informality of the bible belt of her Mississippi adolescence.

Alan Bennett became more northern.

Spike Milligan’s an interesting one. Born in India to an Irish father, he developed a parculiar Indo-Celtic lilt in his post-Goon twilight.

Dan Ackroyd sounds more Canadian by the year, and one day I’ll wake up and a southeast Pennsylvanian inflection will produce a lazy merge of syllables to my own kids’ delight and, god help them, blogs.

Hey, it’s the weekend. Have a really good one. Posts on Saturday and Sunday, or I’ll see you Monday.

Finish it smiling, right?
 

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Related posts:
Accents

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