My love of the 1964 film My Fair Lady is partly due to a couplet uttered by Rex Harrison’s Professor Higgins, but written by the American lyricist Alan Jay Lerner: “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him/ The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” For decades, that felt true: any seasoned listener’s ear was able to discern a Brummie voice from a Cornish or Essex one, or even the kind of Received Pronunciation that was the result of elocution — meaning it was too crisp, with emphasis on the vowel sounds and not enough drawl.

But in recent years, it can be hard to tell whether some teens and twenty-somethings were born in Britain or the US, as more and more young people adopt their accents from streaming TV, YouTube, and TikTok videos. A survey published this week in the Times, which canvassed over 10,000 teachers, found that even the youngest schoolchildren were regularly using Americanisms such as “trash”, “garbage”, “candy” and “diaper”. Whereas British Boomers and Generation X picked up part of their spoken English from the BBC and mentors like Blue Peter’s Valerie Singleton, younger cohorts are taking the lead from Netflix. Meanwhile, programs for teenagers such as Sex Education are deliberately staged in a cultural Anymansland, where the school at the drama’s center is far more like a US high school than a UK comp.

I know from personal experience that this is no exaggeration. My 21-year-old son speaks such fluent Bronx that people’s heads practically spin when I say we’re related. Aged 11, he had a standard RP accent, having been raised in the middle-class ghetto of Cambridge where it’s standard behavior for mums like me to limit internet access. But an adolescence spent talking about basketball online with US teens meant that by the time he reached sixth form he sounded like an extra from The Wire and called everyone “bro”. Now a student at Sussex, he’s maintained his adopted identity by playing in the university’s American Football League.

My boy may be an extreme example of vernacular appropriation, but he’s hardly the only one. Almost every state-educated male London teenager I know, of whichever ethnicity, speaks like a US rapper. In similar fashion, many teenage girls up and down the country have a discernible Jennifer-Aniston-in-Friends-style drawl, sound like Taylor Swift whenever they burst into song and call everything “cute”. The fact is that millions of UK children are now more likely to get a great chunk of their accent and culture from time spent online, and a large part of this happens in the teenage years.

This is in direct contrast to generations of Britons picking up vocal cues from our parents, teachers, classmates and people in the local area. Accents were built by communities and signified a strong, tribal sense of belonging to a particular geographical region. I recently returned from a three-day trip to Newcastle and was reassured to find that in that “toon”, at least, the wondrous, dark-treacle note of pure Geordie still ruled supreme. But cheap travel — not to mention young people’s understandable keenness to escape economic depression and lack of job opportunities in the UK — is leading to big changes. One young woman I know recently returned from a couple of years in New Zealand with a slight Antipodean twang.

It seems clear that identity can no longer be firmly rooted in an accent and regional vocabulary, and that almost everyone — okay, maybe not Scousers — who grows up speaking English is in danger of morphing into a flattened transatlantic Americanese. There are also indications of how things can sway in unexpected directions. Four years ago, expert linguists from Babbel identified the “TikTok voice”, which owed much to Hollywood movies of the Forties and was once known as “the trans-Atlantic American theater standard”. And while researching this article, I discovered that the word “bro” is thoroughly English and was first uncovered in the writing of churchman and humanist scholar Thomas Lupset in the early 1500s. Consult the OED if you don’t believe me. I now intend to tell everyone that my son speaks like a medieval scholar.

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Rowan Pelling is editor of The Amorist and a comment writer for the Daily Telegraph. She edited The Erotic Review magazine for eight years (1996-2004)

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