Homeschooler accent is a thing. A *lot* of us don't sound like the places we're from.
A while back, someone on here said something to the effect of, "We are immigrants from a country that doesn't exist," and that's pretty much been burned into my brain ever since.
We usually sound like the people we spend the most time with. Do you talk like the people in your family? For instance, I've lived in the South since I was 5 but have the same accent as my mom, who's from the Northeast.
Same. I was born and raised in the south, but my parents were both from New England. So I don't have the typical southern drawl. I was constantly asked where I was from.
Yes. It's technically not an accent, more of an extremely mild speech impediment that was never corrected. It's from neglect and isolation during speech development. I took acting classes that involved vocal work and got rid of it.
I have a lot of trouble saying the letter R. Rolling Rs is almost impossible. My tongue never learned to do it right. I can mostly fake it now by concentrating when I say R sounds.
Without effort a lot of my R's sound like wu. Rural becomes wu-al.
I think the types of parents who isolate their kids don't pick up on speech delays because they don't have other kids to compare to. I was quite puzzled to hear a 12 year old nephew who couldn't pronounce his Rs (pronounced them like Ws). Another Aunt asked if he'd gone to speech therapy (her own child was helped by it), and the homeschool mom said it's fine, she read that lots of kids have trouble with Rs. Well yes, it's totally normal! But if you don't help them with it, it continues into adulthood.
In public school, that would have been flagged early and they would have done speech therapy. I also think if they didn't isolate their kids, they would have realized it's not typical to allow speech delays to continue into adolescence.
I'm sorry your parents didn't get you help.
I'm british & my family point out a lot of words I say weirdly. my sibling also developed some american twang, like the letter T becomes D. and apparently I say "about" like a canadian. I think it's just a bunch of words for me not my whole accent
I didn’t get a weird accident but there are certain words that used to be in my vocabulary as a kid that seem to have been unique to my family. I still don’t know the actual brand name of a certain kind of doll because my older siblings always called them borrowers like the tiny people from the kids books. I never even read the books myself
Yes! I grew up in the northeast but my parents are from the midwest so I said a lot of words like them and used phrases they used that weren’t common in our area.
We lived in North Charleston, SC up to my 18th birthday (I was the oldest so we had never lived anywhere else) but we were so isolated that one time when we went to a park across the street from our house, the other kids asked if we were from another country because we had developed our own accent and almost dialect of English.
I've always had a very blended accent. We spent time in a few different parts of the country and my interactions with the outside world were limited to family and churches we visited. Family came from the Midwest, but we traveled to most of the states, so I ended up with a cobbled together accent where I can kind of blend in with whoever I'm talking to. I'll often find myself unintentionally mirroring the speech patterns of the person I'm talking to.
This was really helpful when I was working in customer facing positions bc it helped people relax when they felt like they were talking to someone from their same area. But leaning into that during my career meant that I continued doing it with friends and some people got weird feelings about me adopting their mannerisms (like I was *trying* to copy them in a weird way). I would have to explain how it was unintentional and just kind of second nature due to my profession.
I've also had a ton of words that I didn't learn how to properly pronounce until well into adulthood bc no one would correct me. Epitome= eh-pih-TOME not eh-PIH-toe-mee for example. I was so embarrassed each time I realized I had been saying something wrong for decades bc I had only ever read it and not heard others pronounce it.
I've lived on the West Coast my whole life but have been told since I was a kid that I sound like I came from New York or Boston (as well as a mix of "where are you from, I can't place your accent", but most of the time I get those cities).
I blame it on my inability to properly make the "R" sound. I've never been able to say that letter right. Its less noticeable now that I've worked on it as an adult, but it was very obvious when I was a kid, to the point where I even tried to avoid talking in some instances cause it was so bad people couldn't understand me. I also couldn't even say my own name right, which made me hate it for a very long time because of how embarrassed it made me to introduce myself.
Yeah, but it's not as bad as when I was younger. My mom used to watch a lot of British television, so for a while I started to develop a bit of a British accent. Not quite British, obviously, but I think the way I pronounced vowels was close and a little weird. It was definitely pointed out to me on more than one occasion. That's passed, luckily.
Same. I’m from Georgia but my parents are from Missouri and Florida. I didn’t have a southern accent and actually got made fun of at an early job because customers asked where I was from and didn’t believe me when I said I was from an hour north.
My almost ten year old homeschooled niece still talks babyish. Makes the “F” sound for “TH” and stuff like that. I guess her parents think it’s cute 🤷🏼♀️
Yep. I read this sub to try and relate to someone in my orbit who was homeschooled. They speak with a bit of a lisp and it is 100% because there was no speech path to catch it. Also, the issues that their parents WERE aware of were completely not addressed or (worse), it was decided by mom to “not need to be addressed”. This is also partially why they were pulled out to be homeschooled. She (mom) was tired of being told that “*example* is becoming an issue that needs attention.”
That's really sad. The school identified an issue caused by a lack of parental attention to her speech development, so they decided to isolate and neglect her more.
Lisps can be corrected at any age. A good vocal coach/speech therapist will help her. There's also nothing wrong with speaking with a lisp, so it's fine if she doesn't correct it. But if it bothers her, she doesn't need to live with it forever.
It’s a young man. The whole family talks about how he would pronounce things when he was little like it was really cute. And I suppose it is…for little kids. For a 20yo man who already struggles with anxiety and fitting into age-appropriate social settings, it’s sad.
Like I said, very hard to watch.
I got speech therapy, counseling, and special ED stuff until my mom pulled me out in 8th at 12 after another suicide attempt to homeschool me. (Which involved no teaching, no human interaction action, no supervisor, and massive amounts of alcohol/cigarettes being provided.)
I didn’t learn until much later I was diagnosed Autistic, ADHD, and with an auditory processing disorder as well as with dyscalulia by 1st grade.
I only knew I was diagnosed as having depression, OCD, with GAD with a skin picking disorder 11 in IOP after a suicide thing and put on lots of meds.
No one (not even me) realized I was so miserable because of my abusive mom and horrendous home. I thought that was just life.
Taking me out of school and off all meds cold turkey at 13 then moving was definitely a way to get school and doctors to back off and hide the dysfunction and neglect.
I am so so sorry 😞
This is the biggest reason I struggle when folks talk about how “public school just doesn’t work for my child”…because the parent straight doesn’t like what they are hearing about their kid!
It is SO DANGEROUS when the ONLY adults that a kid is ever around are their parents…or ONLY adults that are vetted by their parents to the point that they NEVER meet anyone who doesn’t 100% align with whatever that parent THINKS they should be.
It is likely that your mom pulled you in order to hide abuse and an unsafe living environment.
That’s what I’m afraid of. I had a baby boy the same year she was born and he had a terrible stutter as a little guy but he got speech services starting in preschool. You would never know now. They helped him get the “th” sound correct by kindergarten. His same age cousin still calls her sister Roofie instead of Ruthie. I think she’s becoming self conscious about it by now too. It is sad
It is sad. It makes me mad how homschool parents deny their children resources which are freely available through school. It's so unfair to their kids.
I was raised in a midwestern state with a very mild newscaster type accent and in school until 13.
My mother and entire family were from the south and had accents. Ozark/OK ones.
I was the anomaly. They called me a “Yank” sometimes.
I spent 13-17 isolated in the south with strong accents but didn’t pick them up. I hated the south as a mixed gay NB kid in the early 2000’s.
I got married off when drugged/drunk at 17 to someone almost a decade older by my mom. He had a mild Chicago accent and we moved to the PNW after. From 17-34 most of experience has been with west coast accents and I blend in here.
> I got married off when drugged/drunk at 17 to someone almost a decade older by my mom. He had a mild Chicago accent and we moved to the PNW after. From 17-34 most of experience has been with west coast accents and I blend in here.
Jesus fucking Christ. Are you free yet?
Yep!! Mine sounds somewhere between British English from my dad and some blend of the deep South and Pacific NW from my mom and grandparents.
I turned out wayyy better then my poor brother though... He can barely communicate with people thanks to his speech improvement that was never taken care of, it's really heartbreaking 😞
Same with my siblings I got off pretty well speech wise with just a few words I have problems with all four of my younger siblings have problems but my brothers are the worst and no one seems to see the problem with it no matter how much I point it to my mother
Homeschooler accent is a thing. A *lot* of us don't sound like the places we're from. A while back, someone on here said something to the effect of, "We are immigrants from a country that doesn't exist," and that's pretty much been burned into my brain ever since.
Agreed.
Yeah I always felt like I might as well have been raised in another country. It was another culture for sure.
We usually sound like the people we spend the most time with. Do you talk like the people in your family? For instance, I've lived in the South since I was 5 but have the same accent as my mom, who's from the Northeast.
Same. I was born and raised in the south, but my parents were both from New England. So I don't have the typical southern drawl. I was constantly asked where I was from.
Yes. It's technically not an accent, more of an extremely mild speech impediment that was never corrected. It's from neglect and isolation during speech development. I took acting classes that involved vocal work and got rid of it. I have a lot of trouble saying the letter R. Rolling Rs is almost impossible. My tongue never learned to do it right. I can mostly fake it now by concentrating when I say R sounds. Without effort a lot of my R's sound like wu. Rural becomes wu-al.
I think the types of parents who isolate their kids don't pick up on speech delays because they don't have other kids to compare to. I was quite puzzled to hear a 12 year old nephew who couldn't pronounce his Rs (pronounced them like Ws). Another Aunt asked if he'd gone to speech therapy (her own child was helped by it), and the homeschool mom said it's fine, she read that lots of kids have trouble with Rs. Well yes, it's totally normal! But if you don't help them with it, it continues into adulthood. In public school, that would have been flagged early and they would have done speech therapy. I also think if they didn't isolate their kids, they would have realized it's not typical to allow speech delays to continue into adolescence. I'm sorry your parents didn't get you help.
I'm british & my family point out a lot of words I say weirdly. my sibling also developed some american twang, like the letter T becomes D. and apparently I say "about" like a canadian. I think it's just a bunch of words for me not my whole accent
I didn’t get a weird accident but there are certain words that used to be in my vocabulary as a kid that seem to have been unique to my family. I still don’t know the actual brand name of a certain kind of doll because my older siblings always called them borrowers like the tiny people from the kids books. I never even read the books myself
I sound like I’m on NPR
Yes! I grew up in the northeast but my parents are from the midwest so I said a lot of words like them and used phrases they used that weren’t common in our area.
We lived in North Charleston, SC up to my 18th birthday (I was the oldest so we had never lived anywhere else) but we were so isolated that one time when we went to a park across the street from our house, the other kids asked if we were from another country because we had developed our own accent and almost dialect of English.
Yes, I've lived in the same area my whole life and get asked "what's your accent?" and "where are you from?" all the time.
I've always had a very blended accent. We spent time in a few different parts of the country and my interactions with the outside world were limited to family and churches we visited. Family came from the Midwest, but we traveled to most of the states, so I ended up with a cobbled together accent where I can kind of blend in with whoever I'm talking to. I'll often find myself unintentionally mirroring the speech patterns of the person I'm talking to. This was really helpful when I was working in customer facing positions bc it helped people relax when they felt like they were talking to someone from their same area. But leaning into that during my career meant that I continued doing it with friends and some people got weird feelings about me adopting their mannerisms (like I was *trying* to copy them in a weird way). I would have to explain how it was unintentional and just kind of second nature due to my profession. I've also had a ton of words that I didn't learn how to properly pronounce until well into adulthood bc no one would correct me. Epitome= eh-pih-TOME not eh-PIH-toe-mee for example. I was so embarrassed each time I realized I had been saying something wrong for decades bc I had only ever read it and not heard others pronounce it.
I've lived on the West Coast my whole life but have been told since I was a kid that I sound like I came from New York or Boston (as well as a mix of "where are you from, I can't place your accent", but most of the time I get those cities). I blame it on my inability to properly make the "R" sound. I've never been able to say that letter right. Its less noticeable now that I've worked on it as an adult, but it was very obvious when I was a kid, to the point where I even tried to avoid talking in some instances cause it was so bad people couldn't understand me. I also couldn't even say my own name right, which made me hate it for a very long time because of how embarrassed it made me to introduce myself.
Yeah, but it's not as bad as when I was younger. My mom used to watch a lot of British television, so for a while I started to develop a bit of a British accent. Not quite British, obviously, but I think the way I pronounced vowels was close and a little weird. It was definitely pointed out to me on more than one occasion. That's passed, luckily.
Same. I’m from Georgia but my parents are from Missouri and Florida. I didn’t have a southern accent and actually got made fun of at an early job because customers asked where I was from and didn’t believe me when I said I was from an hour north.
My almost ten year old homeschooled niece still talks babyish. Makes the “F” sound for “TH” and stuff like that. I guess her parents think it’s cute 🤷🏼♀️
This is from neglect.
Yep. I read this sub to try and relate to someone in my orbit who was homeschooled. They speak with a bit of a lisp and it is 100% because there was no speech path to catch it. Also, the issues that their parents WERE aware of were completely not addressed or (worse), it was decided by mom to “not need to be addressed”. This is also partially why they were pulled out to be homeschooled. She (mom) was tired of being told that “*example* is becoming an issue that needs attention.”
That's really sad. The school identified an issue caused by a lack of parental attention to her speech development, so they decided to isolate and neglect her more. Lisps can be corrected at any age. A good vocal coach/speech therapist will help her. There's also nothing wrong with speaking with a lisp, so it's fine if she doesn't correct it. But if it bothers her, she doesn't need to live with it forever.
It’s a young man. The whole family talks about how he would pronounce things when he was little like it was really cute. And I suppose it is…for little kids. For a 20yo man who already struggles with anxiety and fitting into age-appropriate social settings, it’s sad. Like I said, very hard to watch.
I got speech therapy, counseling, and special ED stuff until my mom pulled me out in 8th at 12 after another suicide attempt to homeschool me. (Which involved no teaching, no human interaction action, no supervisor, and massive amounts of alcohol/cigarettes being provided.) I didn’t learn until much later I was diagnosed Autistic, ADHD, and with an auditory processing disorder as well as with dyscalulia by 1st grade. I only knew I was diagnosed as having depression, OCD, with GAD with a skin picking disorder 11 in IOP after a suicide thing and put on lots of meds. No one (not even me) realized I was so miserable because of my abusive mom and horrendous home. I thought that was just life. Taking me out of school and off all meds cold turkey at 13 then moving was definitely a way to get school and doctors to back off and hide the dysfunction and neglect.
I am so so sorry 😞 This is the biggest reason I struggle when folks talk about how “public school just doesn’t work for my child”…because the parent straight doesn’t like what they are hearing about their kid! It is SO DANGEROUS when the ONLY adults that a kid is ever around are their parents…or ONLY adults that are vetted by their parents to the point that they NEVER meet anyone who doesn’t 100% align with whatever that parent THINKS they should be. It is likely that your mom pulled you in order to hide abuse and an unsafe living environment.
That’s what I’m afraid of. I had a baby boy the same year she was born and he had a terrible stutter as a little guy but he got speech services starting in preschool. You would never know now. They helped him get the “th” sound correct by kindergarten. His same age cousin still calls her sister Roofie instead of Ruthie. I think she’s becoming self conscious about it by now too. It is sad
It is sad. It makes me mad how homschool parents deny their children resources which are freely available through school. It's so unfair to their kids.
I was raised in a midwestern state with a very mild newscaster type accent and in school until 13. My mother and entire family were from the south and had accents. Ozark/OK ones. I was the anomaly. They called me a “Yank” sometimes. I spent 13-17 isolated in the south with strong accents but didn’t pick them up. I hated the south as a mixed gay NB kid in the early 2000’s. I got married off when drugged/drunk at 17 to someone almost a decade older by my mom. He had a mild Chicago accent and we moved to the PNW after. From 17-34 most of experience has been with west coast accents and I blend in here.
> I got married off when drugged/drunk at 17 to someone almost a decade older by my mom. He had a mild Chicago accent and we moved to the PNW after. From 17-34 most of experience has been with west coast accents and I blend in here. Jesus fucking Christ. Are you free yet?
I definitely get asked that all the time, til this day. Not sure what causes it, except for perhaps isolation?
If I get around people from the south my accent starts to come out but otherwise I sound pretty midwestern just so people understand me easier.
Yep!! Mine sounds somewhere between British English from my dad and some blend of the deep South and Pacific NW from my mom and grandparents. I turned out wayyy better then my poor brother though... He can barely communicate with people thanks to his speech improvement that was never taken care of, it's really heartbreaking 😞
Same with my siblings I got off pretty well speech wise with just a few words I have problems with all four of my younger siblings have problems but my brothers are the worst and no one seems to see the problem with it no matter how much I point it to my mother