Why Do We Imitate People’s Accents To Their Faces?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Amber calling from Mansfield, Texas.

Hi, Amber. What’s up?

A good friend of mine who is English made the leap and came over and moved to the States a couple of years ago.

And she was telling me about a couple of experiences she had where people would hear her maybe ordering food or placing an order even at the pharmacy and mimicking her English accent in conversation and saying things like righto and a bunch of other stuff.

And she just was quite baffled that strangers would do this.

First of all, they were strangers.

But then it also got to the deeper point of why do people mimic other people’s accents?

So your English friend speaks English from England with an English accent.

Born and raised in London, yes.

And comes to the United States, I’m just kind of summarizing here, and just everyday encounters finds that people imitate the voice.

Yes.

Do they do it in a mocking way or out of curiosity or appreciation?

Do you get a sense of why they’re doing it?

Some of the encounters she said she was quite shocked when people did it because they were just really stereotypical English or British phrases like, you know, right to go, mate, ready to have a cup of tea.

Cheerio, pip, that sort of thing.

Right, exactly.

And then other people just kind of will talk to her and speak using their own dialogue, but just suddenly switch to an English accent in the midst of a conversation.

And do you think they’re switching accents on purpose or is it something they can’t control?

I think she’s more puzzled by the people who switch on purpose, and especially the strangers that just kind of flip the switch on and start kind of…

I would say it is somewhat of a curiosity thing, but it’s also in a jokey way.

Yeah, there’s lots of layers to this.

Without being a part of all of those encounters, we can’t say for sure what everyone is doing, but we can give you some ideas that maybe make it seem not quite as bad at first glance and maybe in some ways worse than at first glance.

The good stuff is it is natural for us to try to imitate the speech of people around us.

We want to fit in and we want them to fit in.

And sometimes repeating what someone says, even if it’s in your own dialect, makes you understand it more.

It gives you more comprehension.

And certainly if their voice is very different from yours, restating their words in kind of the same form that they said them can give you increased comprehension.

So there’s a real practical reason.

You might even just reflexively, without thinking about it, imitate somebody with a foreign accent or somebody who has a non-American accent.

Another reason you might legitimately do it, sometimes, you might also be doing it consciously to get your mind where they are.

So it’s not just comprehension, just like, I didn’t quite understand those words, those vowels.

Did I really get it?

I don’t want to embarrass myself.

Sometimes it’s about making your own self comfortable before you react, before you give a response.

So those are the good ways.

The bad ways are, of course, obvious, mocking, teasing, joking.

Talk to anybody who works at a register in a store, and they will tell you they hear the same 12 jokes over and over.

And if you talk to people who are tall, they hear the same jokes over and over.

And you talk to people who are overweight, they hear the same jokes over and over.

And you talk to people who are an accent out of water, if we can coin a phrase, they will hear the same stuff over and over.

And it’s because many of us speak when we should be silent.

I think this is where probably a lot of your friends’ encounters probably, unfortunately, fall in that latter category.

I think you’re right.

Thoughtless speech from others who should be silent.

Yeah, that’s a good way to put it, thoughtless speech.

And there’s also a matter of stereotyping that’s really annoying, right?

If you’re talking to someone from the U.K. and you offer them a brawly because it’s raining when they don’t even use that word.

Right, that’s a fake Britishism.

Yeah, or you meet somebody from Texas and you’re like, well, howdy, partner.

It’s a diverse place now.

But again, so the other thing I could say kind of middle between the negative and the positive, the middle ground is it’s an overture.

So if we can just forget for a second what they said and how they said it and acknowledge that they’re trying to engage us in conversation, sometimes it can take a sting out of it.

All they’re looking for is your next move.

They’re making an overture and they want one more response from you and you can quickly get away from this awkward situation that they created because they didn’t know what else to say.

So that’s the middle between those two.

It’s the bad thing to say, but it is the thing that was said, which will get you to the better part of the conversation quickly, right?

You just move past the awkwardness.

It’s kind of like that initial thing is your first date and then everything after this is a successive date where things go better and you actually have a chance at a relationship.

That’s a very generous take, Grant.

I can see how this woman would be annoyed.

Yeah, I’m not always that way.

I’m not always that way.

But I’ve encountered.

I lived in France for a year and did my best to speak French.

And even friends would imitate my American accent.

And it got to where I would imitate Americans speaking American English and crack them up.

Because I was imitating them imitating me, over-articulating my words and doing really big R’s at the ends of things.

And they thought it was hilarious.

But that’s how I handled it.

I just made fun of them making fun of me.

I lived in England, too, which is where I met her.

And I did kind of the opposite, where I toned down my American accent.

Because I didn’t want people to kind of stop me.

And, you know, I just kind of wanted to blend in as much as possible.

Yeah, I can relate to that.

Having grown up in Kentucky and gone to school in upstate New York and had people look at my feet to see if I was wearing shoes, I definitely, definitely changed my accent.

I think the fundamental thing I think the three of us are agreeing on, and anybody who thought for more than a moment about this is, when you encounter someone who speaks differently than you, the first thing out of your mouth shouldn’t be an imitation of their speech.

It should be a greeting, a compliment, some other kind of outreach to them, not remarks upon how they’re speaking.

Amber, thanks for bringing this question to us.

It’s a good one.

Yeah, I am glad that you took the call.

And thanks again for just inviting me to come on the show.

I appreciate it.

Our pleasure.

Take care now.

Y’all have a great day.

You too.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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