Linguistic Immersion in American English

As a Brit, I came to the US with little conception of the nuances of the differences between British and American English beyond the obvious things I had observed in films. Fascinatingly, by the time my parents saw me next (Thanksgiving), a bizarre phenomenon had occurred. I found my family in the UK substantially harder to understand not only compared to before leaving but also to my American friends at Stanford. Moreover, my family commented that I sounded more American than I had before, not in longer conversation but when discussing small words and phrases (ex. asking waiters for "wodder" as opposed to “water” or pronouncing “political” as “poliddical”).

Sumner’s work, both independently and with King and Kataoka, provides some systematic evidence and theory behind my personal anecdote. The general Sumner overview paper explains the social impact that words have. This suggests that accent alterations might be a social response to facilitate understanding and the impact my speech had.

The King/Sumner paper then provides a specific mechanism for that process: given that people seem to remember words better when they are more lexically accessible, it makes sense that I facilitated my being understood in America by Americanizing myself. Smaller social cues like “wodder” presumably create an affinity of understanding that then smooths future conversation. On top of that, though, I have no doubt that my Britishness primed American friends to remember different details about me than they would for Americans saying exactly the same thing, since I pushed them to attach significance to those components of what I was saying that were more tethered to my speaking identity.

Sumner and Kataoka’s paper suggests a similar but slightly more nuanced interpretation of my accent’s changes. Given that people end up acclimatizing to different dialects (ex. GA and BE) even if those dialects deviate from their own, provided they have sufficient exposure in either quality or quantity, it seems that my attempts to smooth basic words constituted ‘primers’ that ensured American speakers were able to adjust to my voice and conduct conversation with me more rapidly. It also explains how I began to find Americans more familiar: I became acclimatized to their voices over weeks of exposure, which then made their dialect easier to understand even at speed.

One area left untouched by these papers is the extent to which becoming familiar with one dialect ‘trades off’ with our comprehension of another. Anecdotally, my becoming more acclimatized to American English made British English actively harder to understand. It would be fascinating to know whether this was a quirk of heavy exposure to Americans in a short period of time, or a systematic consequence of people being primed to appreciate and be familiar with one dialect at the expense of another.