The sounds of acceptance

PARENTS of kindergarten pupils should expect their child’s accent to radically change to sounding more like their classmates in their first year of school.

Macquarie University linguistics professor Felicity Cox said a child’s pronunciation would shift as they made new friends and would unconsciously mimic how they spoke.

“In diverse populations like Sydney today, kids are going to preschool or school with a whole range of different kinds of accents based on their formative upbringing,” she said.

“Once they get to school it is in their peer groups that they really develop those accents.

“Children have an innate desire to be part of a group, a social peer group, so they take in the speech of those around them.”

“If the kids are all of Lebanese background, and they all go to the same school, then it is probable that they all have the same accent.”

She said within NSW there was a large variation in accents between rural towns, multicultural hot spots to Anglo dominated areas. But she said what the Australian accent sounded like would change in coming decades because of diversity.

“That is how the original form of Australian English developed in the early days of the colony – the European children born in the new colony began communicating with each other and … taking on the speech patterns of their peers which came from a whole range of British accents, ” Professor Cox said

Word of Mouth pronunciation school owner Lana McCarthy said schoolchildren had started pronouncing certain words with an American accent. Similarly, she said children and adults inserted redundant words including “like” and “basically” into their everyday speech.

“I think kids now because they’re so exposed to the Americanisation of English they’re pronouncing zebras as zee-bras,” she said.

“When you think about kids, as they get older they’re spending many hours at school so the people around them are heavily influencing their use of language.”

Accent coach Daniel Wolfson works to help adults with their accent and said it had a big effect on how a person was perceived in a workplace. His clients have no trouble speaking English but want to stop their foreign accent from being a distraction at work.

“If you go into fields where you have to persuade or sell, a lot of what goes on is unconscious bias. It can be negative or positive bias,” he said.

“If you hear an Italian or French accent you think it sounds so sophisticated, but you’re not really perceiving the person.”

“There are certain accents that don’t have positive associations at all.”

CHILDREN HAVE AN INNATE DESIRE TO BE PART OF A GROUP, A SOCIAL PEER GROUP, SO THEY TAKE IN THE SPEECH OF THOSE AROUND THEM.

PROFESSOR FELICITY COX