MARK MY WORDS
Meghan Markle has NOT adopted a British accent – and here’s why, according to a linguist
Fans claimed the Duchess of Sussex sounded less American during a public appearance with the Queen in Cheshire
MEGHAN Markle has taken to life as a royal like a duck to water - and some fans reckon her new home is having an impact on her accent.
Earlier this week we told how the Duchess of Sussex, 36, was accused of sounding more British, after a video was posted to Twitter of her greeting well-wishers in Cheshire.
Fans claimed they heard a distinct twang in the way the Californian-born former actress said phrases such as "Oh thank you" and "What's your name?"
So, has Meghan adopted the Queen's English?
According to Dennis Preston, a professor of linguistics at Oklahoma State University, it's our brain playing tricks on us.
“She married an Englishman, she lives in England, she’s hanging with the Queen, and people think, ‘Gosh, she must be doing something with her language,'" he told Yahoo.
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"Essentially, our brain gets in the way of our ear. So we hear what we expect to hear, rather than what we actually do."
He went on: "I did a very careful listen, paying specific attention to her vowels, a big giveaway with British accents, as well as the intonation.
"I just didn’t find anything resembling a British accent. There’s nothing there."
He even went as far to say Meghan naturally adopting our Brit twang in the short time she's been here would be miraculous.
"Us linguists would be flocking there to study her as a strange phenomenon,” he explained.
"These changes won’t happen overnight, and in the terms of language history, overnight is how long it’s been."
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Preston added that the degree to which Meghan's accent will change the longer she stays in the UK is "absolutely unpredictable".
"We don’t know what value she’ll place on it, and that can affect the subconscious shift,” he said.
"She might feel like sounding British will make her seem like a phony, for example, so she may make an effort to stay away from it."
However, dialect coach said it's "absolutely normal" for a human being to take on the accent of the people around them when they want to belong to that group.
She told : “Accents are one of the ways human beings identify as being part of a group. [In] Meghan’s situation, she is representing the royal family, so she’s part of England. So there’s a particular pull for her to take on that way of speaking [and] she may or may not be taking it on consciously."
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