Okay, the title might be confusing, considering we moved to this country almost six years ago. 🤭 But this topic feels like a natural extension of my post about our citizenship.

While living in Germany, we could get by with things we regularly said in South Africa. ‘Ja’ is a staple there, pronounced identically to how Afrikaans people say it. In Canada, ‘ja’ is replaced by ‘yeah’, an elongated pronunciation of the same word. We all picked up the Canadian ‘yeah’ within the first few days of living here.

But the rest didn’t change as quickly. South African English is similar to British in how we drop off the letter R if it occurs after vowels or at the end of words. For example, ‘four’, ‘car’, and ‘smart’ become ‘foh‘, ‘cah‘, and ‘smaht‘. I learned to pronounce ‘r’s’ as the next step in my accent journey, but only while in conversation with Canadians.

For me, lockdown was the game changer. Upon the advice of a speech pathologist in Toronto, we’d been following the ‘one parent, one language’ principle (which, I’ve realised, isn’t a good idea at all), and I’d been the Afrikaans parent. But suddenly, school moved to our living room, and I was Kayla’s tutor.

Her education had progressed exclusively in English, and I wanted her transition to in-home schooling to be as painless as possible. And so, the ‘Afrikaans parent’ disappeared.

My accent became the next hurdle. Kayla struggled to place my pronunciation with her work, and explaining took up too much of our allotted school time. Luckily, her teachers made videos for each assignment, and I mimicked their pronunciation when helping Kayla complete her work. Then, I fell into the habit of parroting sentences back to her in her accent. Any question, whatever she read aloud, and all statements about her work—I repeated everything to her in a way she understood.

During this time, my accent changed drastically. I find it so ironic that the shift didn’t happen among native speakers, but in isolation. And by the time lockdown ended, I sounded almost Canadian.

Meanwhile, Jan’s accent is unchanged. He does soften consonants or actively pronounce ‘r’s’ at the ends of words sometimes, but it’s random. And interestingly, this phenomenon occurs in most of our immigrant friends; the women often pick up the accent faster than their male partners.

Then, the weirdest thing happened. During our trip to the UK, I found myself mimicking the English accent. I had never done anything like that before. With my attention now solidly focused on this strangeness, I realised I’d also started changing my pronunciation while communicating with English-speaking South Africans. And that after years of friends and family making fun of me for my Canadian accent.

Even stranger, I switch between accents instantly and without noticing what I’ve done, depending on my conversation partner. If multiple accents live in the same room, I’ll use all of them. For the first time in my life, I can also do accents while reading to Kayla, and I can weave in and out of them with no trouble at all. It’s weird.

I couldn’t understand why this was happening until speaking to someone about their experience with ADHD medication. They said the medication helped them enjoy music on a deeper level because they could focus on the melody, the lyrics, the bass, or the beat one at a time and process each element.

And a light went on. The timeline suggests my accent mimicry must be a nifty side-effect of the ADHD medication. My theory is that I can now focus on each element of an accent, and because I’m actually hearing the intonation and pronunciation, I can reproduce those sounds. If any of you have experience on this topic, please meet me in the comments or in my DM’s. I’d love to learn more about this!

In summary, my current accent is a strange fluid beast that shapes itself according to my surroundings. It might even be a superpower—the ultimate weapon in the chronic people-pleaser’s arsenal. 🤣

Do you have any interesting accent stories? Please share them in the comments!

Until next time.

Yolandie