odd accents

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I am curious my 9 year old son J has an accent. I am often stopped and asked where he gets it from.
We are Australian his accent is usually American although I was told the other day he sounded scottish.

Do your kids have accents?

I realise this is an aspie thing, and he takes on the accent of his games and or movies. Some days it's stronger than others.

I often mimic accents I hear in movies or on tv...when I was younger I would automatically mimic the accent of whoever I was speaking with, which was more than a little embarrassing. Now I mostly just pull accents out of nowhere...usually British, Australian, North Carolinian (drawl, not twang), or US Midwestern. (I'm from Colorado.)

For a while I had my own way of saying some words. I pronounced idea as "idear" as an example.

My basis was I heard someone say it that way. I can't remember, but I am thinking one of my early intervention speech therapists may have had an accent and I picked that one up.

Otherwise your guess is as good as mine why I would pronounce idea as "idear" when the only states I've lived in are Iowa, Colorado, Wisconsin, and now Minnesota...

I can't remember exactly when it fell out of favor, but eventually I learned to pronounce it the correct way.

Edit: Foxman may be onto something. Sometimes I pick up words I like that are english regardless of local accents. For example I sometimes say critters... I can't say if it was specifically a colorado thing, something a person I knew said or both... I like that word and I stick with it. I guess "pail" should be used here, but I stick with "bucket" and use pain on occasion.

Wisconsin likes to call the things you drink out of by the bathrooms "Bubblers" I though that sounded odd and just rejected it. All 17 years I lived in Wisconsin, I insisted those things be called "Drinking fountains" which is what they were called in Colorado.

It took me several years to call "pop" soda. And now I think it may be called "pop" here, but I'll have to pay more attention...to see what the Minnesotans call things... I don't tend to update my language to fit the local area unless I find something appealing.

Last edited by MJIthewriter on 01 Apr 2008, 1:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think it's an ASD thing. I have an accent too and I sound like I am from somewhere else. I think I got it from my hearing loss but my mother and my shrink says it's both, my hearing loss and AS.

I also called words:
Supposed became pronounced "apposed" and later "suppost"
Precipitation I couldn't pronounce... I bumbled over that one...even though I could hear it in my head pronounced far better.

Participation sounded the same as above to me... I couldn’t figure out why the same word described two different things…

Tornado got pronounced: tomato or tormado
Tomato may have been pronounced: tomado

Perhaps I have a bit of a hearing problem as well. I got the tubes stuck in my ears at age 2 or so... If it isn’t physical it could be something misread in the brain as well…

My Aspie sons went through a phase of speaking in an English accent.

Then my older son went through a phase of speaking with a South African accent.

Other times they have accents I can't recognise. Then back to their Australian accent.

I met Lau (a WrongPlanet member/moderator) in London. He told me that it took him years to work out what his own voice was, so he mimicked others.

Helen

I find myself trying not to mimic other accents upon hearing them.

My son has his own invented voice. Which my husband finds highly annoying (we believe my husband is ASD and, thus, has his own senosry issues). My son says it makes him happy to use weird voices. However, he can control it, as long as he isn't under a lot of stress.

One of the many ways of knowing how much stress he is under: whether or not he is speaking normally.

I have always tended to pick up the accent/dialect of the people who are around me.

One summer I spent a few weeks in New Mexico (think vaguely Mexican accent with a bit of American Indian thrown in) with my brother who sounded like a gangster from New Yawk. Then I stayed for a while with an Irish grandmother, from the West of Ireland. I was raised in Texas and started the summer sounding like a female version of the actor Tommy Lee Jones. By the end of the summer I had the strangest accent on the planet, with Apache speech cadences and the occasional Mexican word thrown in. My teachers at school didn't say a word, but I got some really weird looks, for a while when school started up in the fall.

It think it's a survival mechanism. One copies the actions, behaviors, movements, sounds of the people around them so as to blend in and not bring undue notice to themselves. The last thing I wanted as a kid was for anyone to realize I was there, and wasn't quite like the rest of them. It's so ingrained that it's automatic now, if I'm under any stress at all. Like someone who posted above had noted about their kid - you can tell how stressed I am by the voice I'm using. Or accent. Or dialect. Whatever.

J also reverts every now and then to talking in a high pitch baby voice. This one has had both him and me in trouble with his school in younger years. They (the school) believed he did this because I babyed him. He also made up his own words, and would not change them to the correct words no matter how much I tried to get him to do so.

My son was exactly the same around the age of 4-6. Yep, it's American TV for sure - should have got him watching Coronation Street and it might have been a British one! He's almost 8 now and has pretty much lost it, but still talks a bit awkwardly.

Our son loves mimicking different accents, even if he does it badly. His vocabulary is also much larger than his classmates', probably because of all the higher-level reading he does at home. He definitely speaks "differently" in general than his peers.

I am the same way to a great degree, although I have learned to be more self-conscious about it around other people. As a child I did not adopt the regional accent spoken by my entire family. My younger brother did and does still speak with a thick regional accent. I can affect it (fake it) when I want to, but don't often. I distinctly remember once, when I was in elementary school, another kid's mother was eating with him/her in the cafeteria, and overheard me speaking. The woman asked me if I'd recently moved there from New York. My elementary school was in Oklahoma.

I eventually minored in speech/theater and got high praise for my ability to mimic accents. To this day people tell me I have an "unusual" way of speaking. I am aware that my written "voice" is much more formal and yes, even "British-sounding" than "most" Americans. Perhaps I earned two degrees in English in part to somehow justify or explain away my peculiar manner of speaking.

And my husband, for some reason, gets asked a lot by total strangers if he's from Canada, based on his speech/accent. ??? He was raised in New England, has largely lost THAT regional accent, and does not say "ABOOT" for "ABOUT." He's mystified as to what other people are hearing in his voice.

I'd imagine this is a fairly common thing, with AS - children _and_ adults.

I am a chameleon when it comes to picking up the accents and inflections of the people I am talking with. It can be disarming to some, but I seem to have no control over it.

Until I came into WP, I had no idea that I do it because I'm aspie, I always thought I did it because we moved around a lot when I was young and I just assumed it was something I'd learned to do to fit in.

Yep. When I was in England and Scotland, I found it nearly impossible NOT to speak with the same accent of those around me. When they learned I was American they didn't know what to think. They asked me to "speak American" to them, and I actually found it really hard to make myself do that.

I think some people in the past have thought I was "fake" or "putting on airs" or just plain trying to deceive them.

Imagine speaking like "a little professor" in a small southern town. And being a GIRL, on top of that.

Did NOT go over well.

LOL! I can't wait to hear myself in full Irish brogue!

My son does all sorts of strange voices and accents. He started off with a "normal" voice for when he was talking about special interests or otherwise feeling secure plus a "baby" voice where he would imitate his younger sibling. At one stage this got so good/bad that I couldn't tell which of them was speaking if I wasn't looking at them. Then he started an American accent that we have no idea where he got from (we're Australian, he doesn't know any American people and we don't have TV so it isn't from there). That one's gone now but he has another, a kind of robotic voice usually accompanied by strange face pulling. Don't know where that came from either. He will also imitate any different or interesting voices he might hear.