can you lose your accent?
The case is the following: my friend moved to London, with her dad, and she came back this school year. Now, she speaks in a British accent and I wonder, can a couple of years in a different country change your way of speaking?
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Of course you can. When a person listens to only British accentuated English for 2 years then it can most certainly happen. Your friend had to interact with Britishers & must have tried to speak like them since it's natural for them not to understand English spoken in a different accent.
An accent can change. A lot depends on the point of view of the hearer. A person from England might not think your friend has a British accent, but from your point of view, her accent sounds British. I know people who come to the south from the north, and when they go back to the north, their friends think they have a southern accent. Southerners, however, still think they sound northern.
A couple of years in an environment with a different accent can certainly influence your accent.
It's definitely possible. Human beings have an intrinsic ability to adapt to their surroundings, and adopting an accent would be one of the methods we do in order to do so. That doesn't mean that it just automatically happens for everyone though.
An old friend of mine when we were sixteen moved to Texas and then came to visit a year later, and he completely picked up their accent. At 35 years of age, I spent three months in Australia before coming back home to the states, and while I didn't bring the accent back with me, I was able to pull of a pretty decent Aussie accent, and theirs is really hard to mimic. I could tell that if I spent more time or migrated there, I would no doubt pick it up completely, and possibly even lose my American accent.
So there are factors that come into play, but I doubt you can ever truly lose your accent. Even if you did pick up another one, if you go back to your original surroundings, you will pick it right back up like nothing.
A couple of years is a short time. Maybe she liked the accent!
that's not long enough to lose you're home accent totally i think she was just showing off. usually you get your accent back just by being around and talking with your friends.
yeah yeah sure especially when you merge your self deeply with the culture