Shortly before I started college, I finally wised up to the fact that fluency in my parents’ native language of Mandarin Chinese might be an asset. But after nearly two decades of revolting against my parents’ desperate attempts to keep me in Chinese school, I figured I was toast. Surely, by then, my brain and vocal tract had aged out of the window in which they could easily learn to discern and produce tones. And whatever new vocabulary I tried to pick up would, I figured, be forever tainted with my American accent.
Turns out I was only partly right. We acquire speech most readily in early childhood, when the brain is almost infinitely malleable. And the older we get, the tougher it is to pick up new languages and dialects—to rewire our brain circuitry and to move our mouth and tongue and vocal cords in new ways. But even when you’re an adult, “the way you pronounce sounds can and does change,” Andrew Cheng, a linguist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told me. Just how much will depend on factors such as age, geography, exposure, and natural talent. To a large degree, how we speak also reflects what we feel—especially, it seems, when it comes to regional accents.
Second-language acquisition offers some of the clearest examples of how difficult adjusting to a new way of speaking can be. Take, for instance, the struggle of adult English speakers—like me—to properly deploy the multitude of tones that inflect Mandarin, as my mother will exasperatedly attest. But even within a language, certain ingrained patterns can be difficult to modify. People struggle to unmerge sounds they’ve gotten used to treating as the same, Margaret Renwick, a linguist at the University of Georgia, told me. For instance, Californians, who tend to pronounce Mary, merry, and marry identically, may have a tough time sounding local in parts of upstate New York, where the pronunciations of those three words all diverge. A similar pattern arises among Spanish speakers who emigrate from, say, Mexico to certain parts of Spain, where the s in words such as casa (house) is pronounced as a th.
Many of those constraints can be overcome with enough time or incentive—and the motivation to sound a certain way can be huge. Everyone has an accent, and each one is a beacon to the rest of the world, prompting all sorts of assumptions about the speaker’s age, geographic origins, race, socioeconomic status, even their education and intellect. The associations between voice and identity are so strong that, around the world, cultures have ordered regional accents into a hierarchy of prestige. Researchers such as Alarna Samarasinghe, a linguist at the University of Bristol, in England, have found that people in the U.K. tend to hold people with a southeastern English accent (also called received pronunciation) in higher regard than those who sound like they come from rural parts of the country. In the U.S., accents from the South are commonly described as “nicer” but less brainy. These sorts of biases can affect a speaker’s personal or professional success. For instance, John Baugh, a linguist at Washington University in St. Louis, has found that voices that sound African American or Mexican American—even when they’re not attached to faces—tend to be denied more job and housing opportunities than those perceived as white.
So it’s no shock that people often try to alter their accents, especially as they move between geographies or social contexts. Ignacio Moreno-Torres, a linguist at the University of Málaga, in Spain, recalls rapidly discarding his Málaga accent when he moved to Madrid for college, where his peers immediately ribbed him for his odd speech. Many speakers of African American Vernacular English are all too familiar with the exhausting process of toggling between different ways of speaking in different social contexts, Sonja Lanehart, a linguist at the University of Arizona, told me. Renwick, of the University of Georgia, thinks prestige concerns may be speeding up the disappearance of southern accents in cities such as Atlanta and Raleigh. Many southern cities have seen a big influx of people from other parts of the country over recent decades. If southern accents were better regarded, at least some of those newcomers “might be motivated to sound more southern,” Renwick said, but instead, they’re retaining their old way of speech. Now “the South, on the whole, sounds less southern than it did a half century ago.”
Accents, of course, don’t always bend to expectation or hierarchy. English that’s strongly Indian-accented can, for some people, be more challenging to understand, Okim Kang, a linguist at Northern Arizona University, told me. But she once interviewed a lawyer who was dead set on maintaining that accent because it helped her connect with her clients, who spoke in a similar way. Another person she worked with lost her high-status British accent within months of starting to date an American. One study found that people learning Welsh exaggerated their Welsh accent in response to an interviewer (using received pronunciation) challenging the utility of them learning Welsh at all. “If I want to be socially closer to you, then I’m more likely to imitate what you’re doing,” Cynthia Clopper, a linguist at Ohio State University, told me. “But I can also move further away.”
Our voices, after all, have a powerful influence over the people who interact with us. Researchers have found that little kids generally prefer to hang out with children who look like them—until they’re offered the chance to befriend someone who sounds like them, regardless of appearance. And we’re aware of these tendencies, at least subconsciously. Speakers of all ages naturally take on the mannerisms and vocal patterns of the people they’re interacting with, sometimes within the span of a single conversation, Morgan Sonderegger, a linguist at McGill University, in Canada, told me. It’s easy to poke fun at celebrities, such as Lindsay Lohan, who return from an extended European sojourn with a mysterious new accent—or your own college friends, freshly home from a semester abroad with suspiciously Italian-sounding vowels—but they might not actually be “putting it on” as much as people think.
Even the fabled critical period of language learning in early childhood might be at least partly a product of subjective emotions. Young brains are certainly more adept at hearing and incorporating new sounds. But kids are also less set in their identity than adults are—and, as they immerse themselves in the varied accents of peers they’re eager to fit in with, may feel less allegiance to their “first” way of speech than adults who have had decades to decide who they want to be, Jennifer Nycz, a linguist at Georgetown University, told me.
That flexibility doesn’t have to end with childhood. After about a decade of speaking English with a U.S. accent—acquired in part by binge-watching reruns of Friends and The Big Bang Theory—Yiran Guo, who grew up in Nanjing, China, was proud that her pronunciation was noticeably more American than her friends’ and family’s. Guo’s accent was hard-earned, and she clung to it when she moved to Australia in her late teens to study linguistics at the University of Melbourne. “I actually didn’t like the Aussie accent when I came here,” she told me. “I just didn’t find it appealing.”
But as Guo’s dislike for Australian pronunciation ebbed, so too did the Americanness of her speech. Within a couple of years, most of her vowels had changed to match what she heard from her surroundings—her American “no,” for instance, rounding and rolling into something more like noerh. After seven years of Aussie life, Guo told me, her accent still feels like it’s deepening by the month. But already, she can pass as a local—even to her own adviser, who studies the sounds of speech for a living.