Parental Language Attitudes Towards Their Children’s Accent: Findings from a Nationwide Survey in Australia

Little is known about parents’ attitudes towards their children’s accent and the role they play in transmitting an accent (and attitudes about accents) to their children. Even less is known about how these perceptions and attitudes emerge and are transmitted in multilingual families. We draw on an online survey of parental language attitudes in Australia (n = 267), where 45% of respondents were born overseas, and 61% reported speaking a language other than English. Parents were asked whether they think their children speak with an Australian or another accent; whether they change their accent when they speak to their children, and whether their children’s accents change when they speak to their parents as compared to other people. A total of 14% of parents reported that one or more of their children had an accent that was not Australian, with about half of these children having reportedly hybrid or mixed accents, and the other half no accent at all. Over 11% of parents reported frequently or occasionally changing their accent with their children. Of those parents, several disclosed specific strategies in changing their accents around their children, such as making a conscious effort to sound ‘clear’ or deliberately exposing their children to different accents. A total of 15% of parents reported that their children’s accents frequently or occasionally change when speaking to them. These findings have implications for the complex influences on children’s language and dialect repertoires as they relate to language attitudes, language ecology, and linguistic identity.