I’d like to think this is just an elaborate prank that got out of hand. One of the researchers got bored, checked the list of upcoming arrivals and recognized the name of someone who was really into linguistics but had a reputation for being gullible. A couple drinks later, the rest of the nerds out there were on board with the plan to gradually shift their pronunciation of certain words but never acknowledge the change.
Time passes, the not-so-cunning-linguist arrives and almost immediately begins excitedly taking notes. Before they can do the big reveal, this guy publishes a paper on the findings and everybody has to maintain the ruse since they’d feel bad about damaging the reputations of those involved.
A: Humans mimic others speech (unconsciously) in order to fit in. EG: person from country A moves to country B. Both countries speak English. A few years later A moves home. People in country A now hear a country B accent when this person talks.
B: An isolated population's pronunciation will naturally drift away form that of the seed population. (this is how Latin morphed into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian after the fall of the Roman empire)
In this example you have a population likely to come from several countries with different English pronunciation. While in isolation everyone unconsciously alters their accents to more of a local norm.
Exactly. I can’t on earth see why this would be surprising.
Even my middle school had some unique weird speech shit that someone made up and it caught on.
And this was basically before the Internet. The only thing everyone in my generation knew was that Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could suck his own duck.
Exactly. I don't see it surprising, but cool as hell. Its neat to see how our language can evolve, and also a reminder that it's evolving all the time.
person from country A moves to country B. Both countries speak English. A few years later A moves home. People in country A now hear a country B accent when this person talks.
When you're from country A, but move to country B, you don't feel at home in country B. But when you return to country A, you also don't feel entirely home in country A. You have a slightly different accent, have had different experiences, likely developed different cultural mannerisms, habits, etc. etc. .... You're perpetually stuck between cultures, hence Third Culture Kid(TCK). Especially true of children who move at a young age. So much so that, if they read a book about TCKs, they soon realise that what they thought were unique personality quirks, strengths or character flaws. are anything but unique among fellow TCKs. Also true for adults but to a lesser degree. Also true for people who moved larger distances within a country, changed schools a lot, etc.
A bit like returning from a holiday and finding things have subtly changed, if you stay away long enough you'll likely never feel entirely at home again. The country you knew no longer exists, you're no longer the same, you notice it's not the same, and people notice you're not the same.
Of course, in some ways nostalgia is similar. Nostalgia is homesickness for a place that existed in the past. Like waking up one morning and discovering someone rearranged all the cutlery, it can make you feel perpetually discombobulated.
Unfortunately/fortunately, there's no way to stop time, and Make the World Like it was Again. Not that populists and advertisers won't try to sell you on that lie.
Submarines and other such military things are nation state based. While there is accent variation within nations it would be less than on a multi-national science project.
or it could be it has never been tested and there is language drift in long term and isolated military deployments.
I’m pretty sure there’s a stereotypical (slight) difference in how military people talk, though granted it’s probably to a large part because they’re forced to talk in a specific way a lot of the time.
Humans mimic others speech (unconsciously) in order to fit in
No, it’s because the brain uses the speech from others as additional learning feedback when speaking, as explained in the publication. This is why young children, who have zero interest in fitting in, still develop their accents from their social environment — even if that environment changes drastically
A: Humans mimic others speech (unconsciously) in order to fit in. EG: person from country A moves to country B. Both countries speak English. A few years later A moves home. People in country A now hear a country B accent when this person talks.
Yep. As an American who’s lived in Korea for about 10 years, I catch myself doing this all the time when speaking English to Koreans who understand some English. I also find myself doing the same thing to other Americans, and even my family.
I’ve also been told that I speak Korean with a female accent. I’m pretty sure it’s because the majority of my Korean language exposure is from my wife of 18 years, and her friends. I’ve only really started making male friends of my own in the past three years or so.
Closest thing i can think of is valley girl and surfbro accents in the US, though i guess most affluent people in the past had fairly distinct speech between men and women, because sexism!
The valley girl/surfbro divide is also fundamentally sexism but not outright “this is how women/men should be speaking”, it’s just a natural result of people hanging in groups of their own gender.
I’m not sure about other languages in general, but in Korean females tend to use different intonations, pronounce vowels a little differently, and use different verb endings as a means of sounding more cute.
If you’re not familiar with Korean, then perhaps you’ve heard Japanese males speak before. They’re more harsh, sometimes gutteral, whereas females are more gentle when they speak.
I think I picked up the gentleness speech patterns, and I often catch people off guard. Firstly there’s a foreigner speaking Korean, but he also sounds like a hot chick 😂
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