Can COVID-19 isolation change how you speak? You may emerge with an accent, experts say
If you’ve ever wanted to develop a new accent, now is your time to shine, language experts say.
Turns out, all it takes is “severe” and “long-lived” isolation for accents to develop or stick, which is easier to do now that stay-at-home orders are in place in nearly every U.S. state due to the coronavirus pandemic, Jonathan Harrington, a linguist at the University of Munich, told Atlas Obscura.
But how long coronavirus isolation lasts and how intensely you cut off contact with others outside your home is what will determine the fate of your new accent.
Every person has an accent that stems from when, where and how they learned their native language, according to How Stuff Works. An accent refers to how you pronounce words and usually develops before a dialect: the grammar and vocabulary, together with the pronunciations of a language.
Historically, accents developed when groups isolated themselves on different islands or continents, cutting off contact with others who may speak the same language, Natalie Braber, an associate professor of linguistics at Nottingham Trent University in England, wrote in an article in The Conversation.
New accents aren’t developed that easily today, however, Braber said because fast transportation and mass media are available to connect people around the globe.
Few unique situations lend themselves to the study of isolation and how it influences the development of accents.
Harrington recorded 11 participants’ pronunciations of specific words before and during a prolonged stay in Antarctica for a 2019 study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. They were recruited to spend four months there for the British Antarctic Survey – a program to conduct scientific research projects in the polar region..
The participants had mixed accent backgrounds including ones from England, the U.S., Germany and Iceland, according to the study, and they were all encouraged to spend time together in communal living spaces.
The results revealed that the entire group developed “the first stages of a common accent in Antarctica,” the study said, as was predicted by computational models used in the process.
It came as a surprise to Harrington because he wasn’t expecting to find any change in their accents, according to his interview with Atlas Obscura.
“You can’t hear the differences very well because they’re so small,” the linguist said. “But you can measure them.”
One noticeable change was the “ou” sound, such as at the end of the word “backhoe,” according to the study. “Over time, the team began fronting the end of the word — that is, shaping the sound closer to the front of their mouths,” Atlas Obscura explained.
Although the chances that you and your quarantine buddies will develop a new accent are slim to none, there is one place it could happen, but maybe not to you.
“If they ever really decided to colonize another planet, like Mars, we’d be right in there wanting to study that,” Harrington said, according to Atlas Obscura. “They would develop a Martian accent. Can you imagine that?”
This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 2:15 PM with the headline "Can COVID-19 isolation change how you speak? You may emerge with an accent, experts say."
