Accent in America
My accent is an odd character – it has some form of split personality disorder – it automatically responds to whoever I’m speaking to. If I’m speaking to someone who is from Shetland it turns to Shetland dialect, but defaults to a more neutral dialect when speaking to others. The first couple of times my dialect turned off I thought I’d lost it and got a little worried, but it came back within minutes of getting back home from uni for the holidays.
Having said the above, it does have a sort of a delay built in, for the first few days after moving it’s confused and sits on the fence until it gets the idea and changes properly.
My question is – when I go to America to see someone with an American accent who is from Shetland, what is going to happen, I have 3 theories:
1) It’s going to default to neutral, and I will come out sounding weakly Shetland with some English.
2) Because I’m speaking to someone from Shetland, and there is no neutral English present, it will go back to Shetland.
3) It will revert to what it thinks is neutral given the surroundings, and I will end up with the mother of all bastards of a dialect half way between Shetland and Texan.
Feel free to take wagers, I suspect it will do 1, but I really don’t know.
Then there’s NZ, and I’m not even going to think about HK.