My kids picked up so many British expressions and cadence to their speech thanks to Minecraft YouTubers
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I grew up watching so much TV as a kid back in the 70s that I lost my New England accent.
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I watched so much TV in my youth that I’ve become monochrome, and I shut down at midnight with a rendition of the national anthem.
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My kid became a Yoga with Adriene superfan early-pandemic to a few months ago.
There are now certain words that the kid says very much not like either of their parents do or like New Yorkers would, and that seem more in agreement with Adriene Mischler diction. “Stereo”, for example, is coming out as “steerey-o” lately.
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tbh I feel like within a language, it should be possible for NLP computer systems to adjust the spoken accent of the dubbing to be more in agreement with a local accent. Wouldn’t be perfect but it would scale better than doing dozens of different language variant redubbings.
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I can relate to this. For me the mornings were not complete without Bert Kaempfert’s That Happy Feeling to black and white UHF test pattern.
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Not just young kids, either! After less than a year as an American exchange student in Australia in my late teens, I unconsciously developed an Australian accent, to the point where when I was ID’ed at a club the bouncer didn’t buy my Alabama-issued drivers license partly because I sounded so much like a native Aussie. After I got home, it took about six months for it to wear off. Sociolinguistics is a weird thing.
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Same thing happened to me with Sid and Marty Kroft kid shows in the '70s, especially Puff’n’stuff which I never missed. My parents wound up taking me to a speech therapist because they were afraid the other kids would make fun of my odd cockney accent.
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Only one of them became a white supremacist. They’re all flat earthers, but that’s probably more down to Minecraft than YouTube.
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No, it’s the Curse of Mell Lazarus.
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NSFW warning! Which, on reflection, seems obvious now
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I hope so, but Americans who can’t do a British accent really have to stop saying ‘wanker’ - it just doesn’t sound right.
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When I was a kid, I listened to (1) a lot of classical music and (2) the Beatles. The result was that well into high school, I thought that–if you were going to be so gauche as to sing–it was de rigueur to sing in a Liverpudlian accent.
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Queen Elsa on drugs
Yup, that’s how it starts…
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Did the others start talking about the importance of bread?
OK, maybe not then.
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The same happened to me as a Brit living in California for a year. Border control didn’t believe I was British when I got back, and it was only when I was home that I realised I had picked up a strong accent. The first thing my mother said when I spoke wasn’t ‘Welcome home!’ but ‘You are losing that accent.’ All in all, it took about a year to lose it all.
And even today I have wandering accent syndrome. If I’m abroad for more than a couple of weeks I’ll start unconsciously picking up the local pronunciation of English.
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When I ‘fool around’ and sing some of the stuff by my favorite English singer/songwriter, Robyn Hitchcock, it always comes out sounding something like an English accent.
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