Went to London for a week and came back with a weird mix of British accents (host was from Manchester and we were all over London). Didn’t even notice until my brother asked me why
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Long term research needs to be done into the, probably far reaching, effects of generations of children learning English as Peppa pig and her impossibly posh English accent.
I mean both my children grew up with proper posh English accents at one stage - like it totally raised eyebrows among friends. Who knows where it will end?
(in other news I am also unperturbed by their use of vocal fry and rising intonation from American youths. Because I have real stuff to be worried about and, even if I didn’t, that wouldn’t register!)
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I grew up in Maine, and our drop-in phrase for townie was “Aw guy, trucks guy” (an actual quote from watching an inordinate amount of trucks go over an overpass.) It’s become part of my “trying not to swear in front of the kids” replacement repertoire.
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Now you have me thinking of the character Tom Thomas in Sister Boniface Mysteries performing Shakespeare in the local talent show. 
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This is true. My mother-in-law, who grew up in downtown Tokyo, has a slightly different Japanese accent to my wife, who was brought up in the western side of the city.
Meanwhile my daughter, who is bilingual, sometimes teases them by pronouncing her Japanese with a heavy English accent.
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Gen X here and I’m pretty sure my occasional British affectations are rooted in Monty Python.
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@IRobot was talking specifically about English accents. I wouldn’t be surprised if that hypothesis were true, considering the language originated there and had more time to diverge.
That said, I sometimes see English people claim that their country has more regional accents than any other one, because they only compare themselves with other English speaking countries, most of which they colonised rather late in the development of the language.
As a German living in Norway, I can just laugh on more than one level. Growing up, I could hear by someone’s accent in school whether they were protestant or catholic and in Norway there isn’t any standardised accent. Everyone, even the royal family, speaks in their regional accents. And that doesn’t even take into account that in both countries the language has split along regional lines into distinct languages.
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Americans do this too quite a bit, I love me a little southern drawl at the right moments/etc (and y’all is a linguistic triumph I use anyway), and Boston/New York/etc are all pretty fun.
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This is a very silly article. People have always been adopting accents for fun and in social situations whether it be a fake British accent or something more specific like doing Wayne’s world or Sean Connery or mid-Atlantic accents (and unfortunately less racially sensitive impressions). I file this whole topic under “can you believe what the young people are doing!?” That really every generation of young people have some version of.
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The man said he was very sorry, what more do you want from him? Let it go!
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A cash payment to each and every UK citizen.
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Same (fellow Gen X).
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Mimicking British accents certainly isn’t new. But I rather doubt Millennials (who were born in or afterr 1980) did it before the Internet (either in 1983 or even earlier depending if you want to count the Arpanet as the Internet as some do). Before YouTube perhaps.
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I nearly responded to that comment, but realized Millennials likely consider the internet “existing” after a graphical interface existed. So, after about 1994. Or possibly when AOL started spamming our physical mail boxes with their disks in late 1997/early 1998. 
I made a couple collages with smashed AOL disks back in the day. In a shared housing situation with 5 occupants, we collectively received at least one disk a week!
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Millennial here and, right or wrong, I read the comment as “before video and sound was easy to stream and therefore a major source of influence on speech”
We still had non-streaming movies though and tv. So the whole accent adoption thing had sources of speech pattern influence even when the Internet wasn’t the vector.
All the boys in my school loved to imitate Jim Carey at one point, for instance.
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Exactly. It’s not as if no one in America heard a British accent before the internet. Austin powers (fake also but extremely popular in culture). All the bad guys in Star Wars. Heck when I was growing up in the 80s they showed old British sitcoms on PBS. It was all around us.
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The accents that I almost never hear in the media are any of the Cumbrian ones. Imagine a Northern English person speaking Scots with no attempt at a Scottish accent, with some Geordie thrown in to make things interesting.
My accent has faded since I haven’t been back there in years, but my brain still has to translate words like yan into one.
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I could do a pretty convincing Hilda Ogden / Vera Duckworth back in the day. Tarah luv!
I couldn’t ever pull off a good Geordie accent though, so my dreams of pretending to be Peter Beardsley never panned out.
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Yan tan tethera pethera pump.
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