LL-L "Language acquisition" 2005.09.13 (07) [E]

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From: Isaac M. Davis <isaacmacdonalddavis at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.09.12 (08) [E]


Heather wrote:

> And have you ever noticed that although one parent living out of
> his/her own language area, might (still) have a strong accent,
> the children won't pick it up. The children have the accent of
> their environment - not that of parents who have moved away
> from theirs.

Scríobh Críostóir:

> Yes. I've wondered about this many times. I've (despite my
> best efforts) kept my Nottingham accent because I spent the
> first few years of my life there, even though my mother has a
> Truro (Cornish) accent and I spent later childhood and teenage
> years in west Cornwall. However I can turn a convincing Cornish
> accent on and off at will; my Australian wife's father is from
> Kildare yet she can't do any sort of Irish accent (much less a
> Kildare one) no matter how hard she tries. She has said
> numerous times that she never "heard" her father's accent when
> she was a child, and I don't much remember noticing my
> mother's accent as different from my siblings' (who have
> Nottingham accents), either.

Odd, innit? My mother grew up with a Scottish (from Largs) father and a 
Canadian mother, and apparently her older brother (the eldest child) took a 
really long time to learn how to talk. My grandmother thinks it might have 
had something to do with such a gap in pronunciation between her and 
Gran'pa. Like he had two possible models, but he didn't know which one to go 
with. I don't know how much merit the idea has, but that's what she says. 
And in any event, my uncle (and the others) acquired a pretty standard 
middle-class Ontarian accent. I've only heard him and my mother imitating a 
Scottish accent. He's pretty good; my mother overdoes it. Actually, I think 
I'm better at it than she is, but she's not really good at accents in 
general, and I am.

My grandfather's brother, though, married a Scottish woman and had two 
children, and apparently my mother and her siblings found it absolutely 
hilarious that when they (the cousins) were little kids, they had 
thickthickthick Scottish accents, which of course faded when they started 
attending school.

One last anecdote in this vein: I used to work with a fellow who was raised 
right around here in eastern Ontario, but whose father is from Newcastle, 
has a strong Geordie accent, but apparently Brian (my former co-worker) 
can't hear it at all. He hears when his father doesn't distinguish (from the 
perspective of our dialect, which merges cot and caught) between Barb and 
Bob, for example, but he just doesn't hear his father as having an accent.

Paul wrote:

> This reminds me of a TV serial in the 90s starring Robert Carlyle
> and set in a tough area of Edinburgh with a particularly heavy
> accent (Carlyle is a genius at accents).  Because the dialogue
> was so difficult to follow, they subtitled it.  OK so far...but not in
> Standard English, they just transcribed the dialect!!  So you
> couldn't understand half of what they said, and couldn't read it
> either!!

That sounds hilarious, though I suppose it might be rather frustrating.

Isaac M. Davis

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language acquisition

Hey, Isaac!

Late start of speaking appears to be a fairly frequent phenomenon in 
children to whom their parents speak in different dialects or languages, but 
once they start they tend to take off like rockets, often equally well in 
both varieties.  Perhaps they need that extra time to sort out "the mess," 
and once they have, they display heightened language ability.  I know quite 
a few individuals and families that fall into this category, and this seems 
to be a frequent outcome.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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