I grew up in North Carolina and had a decently strong southern twang. After four years of college in the Midwest and dating a girl from Chicago, my accent has become southern with a bit of midwestern mixed in. If you moved to other parts of the country, has your accent changed too?


46 comments

  1. I had a strong Michigan accent. I moved to Colorado 20 years ago and it’s smoothed out a lot, but if I’ve been drinking or am tired it comes back a bit.

  3. I have to consciously soften my r’s to get myself back to sounding like my original accent.

  4. When I lived up north, my accent and word choice split in two.

    Growing up in Texas, I don’t have a marked regional accent, but my vocabulary is naturally about 4% southernisms and 4% or so Mexican Spanish.

    In Chicago and New England, I had a work voice, which was super neutral, because I was tired of getting bigoted comments when I spoke my natural English.

    But correspondingly, I started speaking way more Southern/Mexican at home and picked up a bit of a southern accent for the first time. Changing my accent and word choice became a signal of “I’m home now, I can relax”.

  5. Had to neutralize the accent when i moved to AZ so people could understand me, then I was studying foreign language in North Dakota, from people born in North Dakota. That heightened focus on pronunciation ended up with me being regularly mistaken as a Canadian.

  6. I don’t really hear myself or had that much of a move to really notice.

  7. Yes, and because of living different places, I have a mishmash of accents and slang. I really confuse those “we can guess where you’re from by your language use” quizzes LOL

  8. I have a strong Michigan accent and have consciously maintained it in all of my travels. Being a Michigander is part of my identity. The only time my accent changes is when I need to grade my speech for learners. Living where I live the only person I speak English with on a daily basis is my wife and the other people I speak it with are wanting to practice so I try not to destroy all of their hopes and dreams with my native accent.

  9. Same here, lived in the South but go to college in the Midwest. When I came back everyone said I lost my accent

  10. Yes, grew up with an Appalachian/Southern family and had the accent, and then moved to NYC for almost a decade. Dad came back from a trip to NJ once when we were young and said people treat us worse / assume we’re stupid if we speak like Appalachians.

    When I’m back in Kentucky, the Appalachian accent comes right back out. In the rest of the world, I have a standard accent with a NYC twang to it. Kind of strange, and yet not. Kentucky is the “old world” part of my brain and NYC became “everything else.”

    I had an Indian friend in Kentucky whose family was from Mumbai and he had something similar as between his family vs everyone else. The switch is more or less subconscious. Kind of fun.

  11. People tell me they can tell I’m originally from New Jersey once they’ve seen me angry. I guess I tap into that north Jersey accent for a little extra flavor when I’m upset. Other than that, people wouldn’t be able to tell that I learned to speak from two caricatures of the Sopranos that I called Mom and Dad.

  12. Quite a bit.

    As a kid, I had a pretty noticeable Suffolk County/Long Island accent. Once we moved to Texas, it began to smooth out.

    My vocabulary is now mostly a mishmosh of Dallas-Fort Worth and the Brazos Valley. The way I pronounce things is mostly generic American, to the point that most people have no clue where I’m from other than “the US.”

    However, when I get truly angry, and sometimes at random, a Texas drawl comes out. When I’m mildly irritated, giving speeches/presentations, or talking about sports or public transportation, the Long Island comes out.

  13. Yeah, when I lived in the Midwest I adopted some of the nasal vowels I heard all around me. But if I had a couple drinks it all went away.

  14. I grew up in San Francisco with a General American accent. I moved 80 miles South to Santa Cruz for college, where many of my friends were from Los Angeles, and wound up with a slight California accent. 

  15. I moved around a lot as a kid. My Texas accent was always pretty light but now I sound like a generic American.

  16. I don’t know if there is a term for it but I have moved around a lot and visited a lot of places. I sort of adopt the sound of folks around me, whatever accent they have. Like when I hang out with friends from the Boston area I come back talking like a guy from Southie, just lightly though.

    Same if I visit my family in the south. I came back from a recent trip down in Alabama and my buddy from up here in Maine totally called me out on it.

    It fades away and I go back to normal.

    I do notice I have picked up some New England sounds and stuff since moving here. Answering the phone when my mom calls “ey Ma” was noticed by my mom.

  17. I mean, I came to the US at age ten from Ireland so I’ve lost a lot of my Irish accent. Americans usually say I sound Irish and Irish people usually say I sound like an American.

  18. I find that my accent is standard American almost all of the time, but becomes more southern when I’m angry.

  19. I never had a particularly strong southern accent, so I lost it completely when I moved to the Pacific Northwest. I’ve been back in Alabama for over a decade now, but I still don’t feel like I’ve ever gotten my accent back. I went back to visit some friends up in Washington recently and they said I had an accent, so who knows?

  20. I grew up in the mountains of West Virginia so my accent was very hicky and mountainy as a child. Traveling improved it to a degree and living in Tennessee it’s more southern now but there are many times my natural accent slips out

  21. I had a moderate Michigan accent as a kid. When I was 15 my dad’s job got transferred to Monroe, Louisiana, where I lived for the next 5 years. My Louisiana friends said I still sounded like a Michigander, but I’d been back a week when someone said, “What part of the South are you from?”

  22. I had a strong Long Island accent. I live in Michigan. It is definitely still there but not as strong. Like others have said, it comes out stronger when I am tired and/or angry.

  23. Oh yeah. I’m from Chicago, never noticed our accent until I moved away after college. I went to college in state where a huge chunk of the student population was from Chicago and its suburbs. I moved to Kentucky for grad school and worked at a restaurant that would pull in lots of people from all over the state for game days. I quickly picked up a slight twang and a difference in the cadence and intonation of my speech, and when I came home for the holidays I noticed the Chicago accent for the first time in horror, and all my friends teased me for my newfound twang.

    Met my future husband there and my in laws live on the cusp of Appalachia, so they have some unique speech patterns that I’ll find myself picking up after spending a week with them. We live back in Chicago and my accent has come back with full force. I just know how to pronounce Louisville correctly now.

  24. My family is native to Arkansas and Tennesee. I moved to Kentucky in January of 2006 when I was 4. When I was younger I didnt sound like I was from Arkansas or Tennesee. But as I reached adulthood, it sounds like my southern accent started to form a bit. I guess it was because I grew up in a household with that accent.

  25. My sister grew up in California but moved to Louisiana over a decade ago. While it’s not as strong as her husband’s (who grew up there), she definitely has a bit of that southern accent compared to before she moved.

  26. > Has your accent changed as you moved to other parts of the country?

    Sort of? But I’m not sure if it’s an *accent*, specifically?

    I grew up in Minnesota and then moved to New York. I’d grown up calling it “pop”, which everyone out here thought was really weird… So I started calling it “soda” instead. I also noticed that basically nobody clearly enunciated the “g” at the end of something like “going”… Or actually said “comfortable” the way it’s spelled. So I started saying “goin” and “comfterble”.

    I’m not sure if that’s really an accent thing? Or specific to my upbringing (my mother was very class-conscious and had taught English, so she made damn sure we enunciated clearly)? Or maybe just some uniquely weird thing I’d come up with?

    But, yeah, I’ve changed how I talk.

  28. Grew up in New England and never had a very particularly strong accent but it was there.

    Live in the South now and I have definitely assimilated “y’all” into my daily vocabulary and the way I pronounce my “o” in words like slow or go has changed a bit (more fronted/rounded as they’d say in phonetics). I also err on the side of pronouncing all my final “r”s whereas back home it was more of a 60/40 chance whether or not I would.

  29. Grew up in California – moved around a bit to the south and Midwest. They still know

  30. My accent was forged in the 12 years of my life in the SF Bay Area of California. It hasn’t really changed at all as I’ve moved around the country. In fact I’m kind of proud of it and go out of my way to sound Californian sometimes. However, I have picked up a lot of local slang. Like I lived in Boston for awhile and definitely picked up the use of “wicked” this and that. It’s just a cool word I enjoy saying. But you would never hear a California lifer use that word. And I’ve known a lot of people who moved down South as adults and picked up the use of “y’all” instead of “you guys”.

  31. Not that I’ve noticed. I definitely use “y’all” like it’s going out of style though. The perfect acronym!

  32. Yes. I grew up in Central Pennsylvania and I had more of a Pennsylvania Dutch accent. If you know how that sounds you know it can be pretty recognizable. When the Air Force sent me to VA in 2011 it started mixing into this odd dutchy southern sort of accent. Now, it’s it’s more of a southern tone but still not recognizably southern.

  33. Yes and I don’t even know how it happened!

    I had a thick Boston accent when I moved to Texas, but after a few years here, it’s gotten a lot less and I find the letter R and the word “y’all” creeping into my speech. When I went home, at first I was shocked because I actually *noticed* my own native accent in other people’s speech….it was weird to hear it the way everyone else hears it. And I was surprised to find that without thinking about it, my own accent came back full force.

  34. I live between rural western PA and Winchester, Virginia. I have also lived in the deep south for a number of years.

    Y’all is just a regular part of my vocabulary now.

    However, I cannot shake some of the Appalachian language give aways.

  35. I spent a lot of my childhood in the Philly suburbs and moved overseas as a teen. I heard the Philly accent for the first time when I visited after a couple of years. My mind was blown that people I knew sounded different to me after being away. My sister told me I used to sound like that. I don’t think I have a distinct regional accent anymore, just a general American accent. My parents both slip back into their Philly accents around family, but my siblings and I don’t.

  36. When I was a teenager I moved to Tennessee, I eventually developed a bit of a southern accent when it came to certain words. When I moved back to Michigan about two years later it went away pretty quickly.

  37. Yes. When I lived in Minnesota, my parents mocked me every time I came home. 

  38. A little bit yeah, I’ve picked stuff up along the way. Especially with certain terms, “y’all” is a big one.

  39. Yes, twice but apparently minor since in both cases people still hear me talk and tag me as a New Yorker but that was 50 years ago. But my mother said I sound like a “News-Caster (northern New England for 30 years” . A few minutes on the phone with my sister and my accent changes – my husband can always tell I’ve been talking to her but she’s lived in two states.

    My mother died years ago and never left that Brooklynese/Staten Island twang and my kids, growing up, thought it was just awful

    I think we develop our speech patterns at a early age and revert to attenuated versions of them.

  40. Born and raised in upstate of South Carolina. Never moved till I was 32. Now I’ve lived in 7 different states all in the south east and my accent has chilled out a lot. But when I go home for visits, or around old friends, or get to drinking it comes back out… with a vengeance.

  41. My late wife was born and raised in Canada until she was 10 and then moved to Tennessee. Her accent was an interesting mix of Canadian and southern twang. I liked it.

  42. I grew up in Southern Illinois, close to Kentucky, and so had a twangy accent. I went to college in Wisconsin, and the twang flattened quite a bit. I’ve since moved about 75 miles north of my hometown, and the twang has returned but not to the original extent.

    I’ve always had the backwoods idioms and sayings that my dad’s family used. I’ve never let them go, mostly because I find them hilarious, and they remind me of my grandparents.

  43. I grew up in southeast Michigan, where no one thinks they have an accent until they move away for a year. Moved to San Francisco for five years, where I quickly learned to stop saying words like “pop” and “party store”, and where my naturally squeaky accent got flattened and smoothed out a bit. Then moved to New York City for 24 years. New York accents in general have toned down quite a bit in most areas over the past several decades, so it wasn’t a dramatic shift. But it has definitely made my speech patterns faster, and I will catch myself saying certain words, such as “coffee”, with a decidedly Brooklyn pitch. I find that other words will bring out the old-school Michigan in me. Particularly if I get excited or start talking about “huntin'” and “fishin'”. Now, nearly 30 years later, when I go back to Michigan, I find the accent incredibly obvious and grating.

  44. Yes – pretty similar to yours. I am from and grew up in NC and now live in the Chicagoland area. My accent up here (in Illinois) is pretty much the neutral newscaster American accent. When I go back home to NC, It takes about 5 minutes for my accent to return.

    I tend to pick up the accent of wherever I am.

  45. I had a Chicago accent. Moved to Texas and 10 years later I can absolutely hear southern influence in it.

  46. Yup, definitely. When I was younger I had a thicker accent, and after I moved to Florida it smoothed out. I definitely still have most of the notable features of it, though.

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