A while back I saw a Youtube short from an internet personality (link). She is a resident of Britain, but she has an American accent. One frequent question she gets is why. Her answer was that she grew up gaming online, and when you game online, you're gaming with Americans. Now, she just talks like an American when she is around Americans or when she puts on a headset. To me, it sounds like she's saying it's involuntary and she can't help it.
I have encountered this phenomenon of involuntary accents before with a friend from South Africa who speaks with a perfectly American accent. One day he answered a phone call from his mom and his accent changed to his Afrikaans accent. He later explained to me that he can't help it; when he talks to his parents, he speaks in that accent.
Even more recently, I discovered Asmongold and I couldn't tell he was Texan at all until he started talking about something that was cozy and familiar to him in a relaxed mood. That means that even Americans with regional accents are subject to this phenomenon!
My mom is New England. My dad is from the American mid-west. I spent my youth in Florida. One day at work in a California-based call center about ten years ago, I took a call from a career military person who said she moves around a lot and is familiar with different accents. She said I had a very interesting accent, and she guessed that it was a mix of New England, mid-western, and Floridian. Now, here's an odd thing, I watch Canadian Youtubers enough and I now pronounce about as aboot. Not all the time, but enough.
One of the odd phenomena that I and other people in the call center discussed was that we start to involuntary imitate the accents of the person on the line while we're on the phone with them. I can't do these accents on purpose, and I'm not doing it on purpose. It stuns you for a couple of seconds the first time you catch yourself doing it, and then you have to choose to consciously reign it in.
Where is this going? Human beings are social animals, and part of that means were adaptable. Sometimes we change to fit in whether we realize it or not. The internet is accelerating this, and I think we're all converging on an Internet Accent. What's an internet accent? I think it's the average of all our collective accents from mutual conversation in one global forum, and I'm happy to announce that it sounds American! I'm calling it now, in 500 years, an American accent will be universal. Everyone get used to saying your R's like a pirate ("arrrrh!"). Can you imagine if one day there are different subsects of Internet Accents that give away what your internet interests are? I'm not going to begin to speculate on that.
I'm not even interested in the social sciences, but I'm very interested in learning more about this Internet Accent idea. There's a wikipedia page dedicated to Internet Linguistics that needs a new section. That's it. Thank you for reading.
