Speech Lessons

The accidental accent:

after nearly two decades of revolting against my parents’ desperate attempts to keep me in Chinese school, I figured I was toast. Surely, by then, my brain and vocal tract had aged out of the window in which they could easily learn to discern and produce tones. And whatever new vocabulary I tried to pick up would, I figured, be forever tainted with my American accent. Turns out I was only partly right. We acquire speech most readily in early childhood, when the brain is almost infinitely malleable. And the older we get, the tougher it is to pick up new languages and dialects—to rewire our brain circuitry and to move our mouth and tongue and vocal cords in new ways. But even when you’re an adult, “the way you pronounce sounds can and does change,” Andrew Cheng, a linguist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told me. Just how much will depend on factors such as age, geography, exposure, and natural talent. To a large degree, how we speak also reflects what we feel—especially, it seems, when it comes to regional accents.

You are who you imitate...