53. ACCENTS ARE FOREVER

A few months ago, a viral video caught my attention: 19-month-old Orla from Liverpool 'speaking' fluent scouse without saying a single real word. While she can't yet do what we'd define as talking, she has the sounds and intonations of her local accent down to a T. And it's almost certain she'll sound largely the same as an adult.

Crying in melody

The video was especially interesting to me as a first-time father to a four-month-old who already enjoys experimenting with his voice, albeit in a much less formulated manner than baby Orla. My son is being raised bilingual in Dutch and English, the native languages of his parents, and so far expresses this in a series of high-pitched shrieks that become a type of loose 'conversation' when done back to him. My partner believes that these vocalisations seem mostly English-accented with the occasional Dutch /eː/ (as heard in the word 'nee'). To me, they just sound like high-pitched shrieks.

Even if I don't hear it, it's true that he's already formulating his unique manner of speaking, one that will likely remain for his entire life. In The Guardian's coverage of Orla's viral video, they note that even the crying of babies is accented: "In one 2009 study, Prof Kathleen Wermke, a pioneer in the field of speech development at the Würzburg University in Germany, found that French infants tend to wail on a rising note and German babies favour a falling melody." In other words, babies know the contours of their native language long before they can actually speak it.

A hundred trillion connections

Although it isn't strictly true that all accents are forever, it's very likely to be the case. The lucky individuals who can learn a language later in life and sound precisely like a native speaker are few and far between, as are those who change their accent in their native language after childhood. The reason is the unique nature of a newborn baby's brain, which has as many neurons as an adult's brain but none of the connections between them. Some hundred trillion of these connections will have formed by the age of three, all based around the repetition of different stimuli and tasks. And the sounds that make up the languages and accents of those around you are the most common stimuli of all.

But it goes quick. Research detailed by National Geographic shows that babies have a knack for discriminating between sounds in any language, native or foreign, for the first few months of their lives. However, between six months and a year, they start to lose the ability to make such distinctions in foreign languages and get better at discriminating between native language sounds. Japanese children, for example, cease to be able to distinguish between 'l' and 'r' sounds. Children older than one can still learn new languages fluently through exposure, but their capacity to sound like a native speaker progressively dims with age.

Bilingual beliefs

So, what about language acquisition in bilingual babies? I'm pleased to report that the commonly held 'wisdom' is incorrect: being raised with two or more languages does not impede language development. This belief may stem in part from the fact that a bilingual child's vocabulary grows at the same rate as for a monolingual child but is spread across the two languages. This results in a smaller vocabulary per language in the early years. Bilingual children also transfer words and grammatical rules across their languages, but then again so do I when I haven't had enough sleep.

As for the benefits, I don't need to link to a study: my own Belgian partner spoke Dutch at home and French at school, then began learning English only at the age of 12. Her bilingual experience played a huge role in swiftly making her trilingual. And when it comes to defining rare English words, she's constantly able to correct me thanks to her knowledge of their French analogues. We've been fortunate enough to find a bilingual nursery for our son in which one carer speaks Dutch to him and the other English, so I'm looking forward to hearing what accent emerges. Just as long as it's not too much like baby Orla's.

- Josh