Why your accent changes when you live abroad

The short answer

Your accent shifts because you adjust, without thinking, to the people you talk to every day. Linguists call this accommodation. The longer you spend among speakers of another accent, the more small pieces of it you take on: a word here, a vowel there, the tune of a question.

Adults rarely swap one accent for another completely. What usually happens is a blend, and the blend is real, normal and shared by millions of people who live away from where they grew up.

You adjust to the people around you

In the 1970s the social psychologist Howard Giles began describing what became known as Communication Accommodation Theory. Its central idea is simple: when we want to get along with someone, or be understood by them, we move our way of speaking a little towards theirs.

Later studies measured this in the lab. In one well-known line of research, the linguist Jennifer Pardo recorded pairs of people working together on a map task and found that their pronunciation grew more alike over a single conversation. Listeners who hadn’t heard the task could tell that the partners sounded more like each other at the end than at the start.

Now stretch that conversation over months and years. Every chat with a colleague, every coffee order and every phone call nudges you a little in the same direction. It adds up.

Even very fixed accents move

You might think a settled adult accent stays put. The evidence says otherwise.

In 2000, the phonetician Jonathan Harrington and his colleagues published a short paper in Nature that studied the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts from the 1950s to the 1980s. Over those decades, some of her vowels moved towards the speech of younger, less aristocratic speakers around her. If an accent as carefully kept as hers could shift, yours certainly can.

What changes first

People who move abroad often notice the changes in a similar order.

1 Words. You start saying cheers for thanks, flat for apartment, or the other way round. Vocabulary is the easiest part to pick up, because you hear it every day and it’s useful.

2 The tune. The rise and fall of your sentences can drift. Questions, surprise and polite requests start to sound like the local versions.

3 Single sounds. Particular vowels and consonants move. A t softens, an r appears or disappears, a vowel lengthens.

4 The whole system. This last step is rare in adults. Your new accent picks up local features without fully replacing the one you grew up with.

Why you sound “foreign” in both places

This is the part many expats find unsettling. Back home, friends say you sound like you’re from abroad. Abroad, locals still hear where you’re from.

Both are true. You’ve moved partway, so you now carry features of two accents at once. Each group notices the features that aren’t theirs.

Many people find that their accent also moves with the company. They sound more like home on the phone to their parents and more like the new country at work. Switching like this is common, and it is a skill, not a sign that you’re confused about who you are.

Does age matter?

Yes. Children who move tend to take on the local accent of their friends, often quickly and completely. Adults change more slowly and less completely. Research on immigrants, such as James Flege’s studies of Italian speakers who moved to Canada, found that the older people were when they arrived, the more of their first accent they tended to keep.

That isn’t a failure. An adult accent is built on decades of speaking, and the parts of it that stay are part of your story.

Is it fake?

No. Accommodation happens below conscious control, which is why it often surprises the person doing it. You haven’t put on a voice. You have simply spent a long time listening to new people, and your speech has done what speech does.

If you prefer to keep more of your original accent, spending time with people from home, listening to radio and podcasts from your region and calling family often will slow the drift. If you’d like to sound more local, the same works in reverse: listen closely and talk to as many local people as you can.

Hear the change for yourself

Because accent drift is slow, it is almost impossible to notice from the inside. A record helps.

Try this. Record yourself reading the same short paragraph now, and again every few months. Keep the files. A year from now, play the first and the latest one back to back, and you’ll hear changes you would never have spotted day to day.

For a second opinion that doesn’t know your history, take an accent test you read a short passage aloud and it names the accent it hears most. Take it when you arrive and again a year later, and see whether the answer changes.

The takeaway

Your accent changes abroad because you are listening and adjusting to the people around you, which is exactly what good communicators do. The blend you end up with is a record of where you have lived. You can keep it, steer it or simply enjoy it.

Further reading

• Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland and Justine Coupland (eds.), Contexts of Accommodation (Cambridge University Press, 1991)

• Jennifer S. Pardo, “On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119 (2006)

• Jonathan Harrington, Sallyanne Palethorpe and Catherine Watson, “Does the Queen speak the Queen’s English?”, Nature 408 (2000)

• James E. Flege, Murray J. Munro and Ian R. A. MacKay, “Factors affecting strength of perceived foreign accent in a second language”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97 (1995)

About the author: Yusuf Tör makes Sterling, an AI-powered accent coach that teaches you how to speak English with a British accent confidently and clearly.