Parents across Ireland curse American television and online videos – but are Irish children actually developing American accents for good?
Concerns have been raised that young Irish people are losing their unique Irish accent due to media consumption, developing what has been dubbed the “YouTube twang”.
Children certainly watch more American media than previous generations, but Dr Stephen Lucek, linguistics professor in UCD, said the risk of long-lasting impact is exaggerated.
“It’s difficult to predict,” he told The Hard Shoulder. “What I can tell you is that I talk to teenagers every day, and I don't see an overwhelming shift towards American English.
“What I see is people who are trying to figure out who they are.
“Maybe they're influenced by their friend group or the media they're watching – but oftentimes, that’s not something that really lasts.”
Changing voices
Dr Lucek said you might witness long-term changes in language “from one generation to the next”, but these changes are small and slow.
“We refer to it as glacial speed,” he said. “It tends to happen very slowly.
“We can notice things and we may have more access to teenage voices through social media than we did 20 or 30 years ago.
“20 or 30 years ago, television and American culture was very much globalised... but people who were [teenagers] in the 90s and early noughties, an American accent didn’t carry through.”
Accents 'levelling'
But even if accents are changing among younger people, this is a natural linguistic process according to Dr Lucek, who explained Irish adults today might sound less “Irish” than previous generations.
“The further back you go, the more likely you would be able to figure out where people are from,” he said.
You might think, for example, someone from Kerry is very clearly from Kerry, but in previous generations and centuries that accent would have been even more “amplified” than now.
“Regional accents have sort of levelled.”
While there are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to overconsumption of media, one thing you don’t need to worry about is raising someone who pronounces Ireland “Iy-er-land".
