THE next generation of young Irish professionals will most likely speak with American accents, Ireland's leading expert on language has claimed.

Prof Jeffrey Kallen, the head of Linguistics and Phonetics at Trinity College Dublin, said "US English" is now the chosen accent of teenagers from all over the country.

He said how you speak is not necessary defined by geography, and is instead influenced by your peer group. This is even more so the case with teenagers, who like to speak like each other in order to feel part of a tribe.

Prof Kallen, whose specialist area is the English language in Ireland, says the phenomenon of young Irish people sounding American is not as inexplicable as it may first appear.

He believes US English has taken on a "global quality" and that "it belongs to the world".

This, combined with how language is constantly changing, means the new way of speaking in Ireland may not be a fad, and is likely to endure.

Prof Kallen said: "The thing with accent is less about geography and more about the extent of who you talk to. It's your social group.

"People will talk a lot more like each other in a face-to-face conversation, it's a natural process. So when you hear teenagers in groups – which they usually are – you will really hear this American influence. I have noticed it myself.

"If you get these teenagers to read a page of a book, they will read it in a particular way, but when they are talking to their friends, they will speak differently."

He said that when we meet someone, how they talk is a very quick and effective way of putting them in a particular social group.

"We look at the outward signs and the best clue is in their speech," he said. "They are one of us, or they are not one of us. Are they different? Or are they in my gang?

"We use speech styles to get on with people, we note these distinctions in accent, vocabulary and grammar.

"Teenagers do not want to speak like their parents. They want to break away from their parents and sound like their peer group, people their own age – they are members of a tribe and they try to cultivate this unconsciously through how they speak.

"If you look at adolescent speech in Ireland today, will it remain? Time will tell. But language is always changing."

However, Prof Kallen said a trained ear can pick out an Irish speaker of US English from an American native speaker, as the Irish tend to fall into the trap of "hypercorrection", a sociolinguistic term for over-pronouncing words.

So we will never fully sound American.

"In many ways, this new accent is more American than the Americans themselves. They have taken some features of US English and exaggerated them. They have adopted many parts of American influence, but it doesn't sound altogether American, not like in America.

"There is a term called hypercorrection: this is a feature of the US American that is being used here. It is mostly heard in people who would not be familiar with America – it lacks the interactive dimension to it. It doesn't sound natural."

But why has American, in particular, become the chosen accent for teens from Cavan to Cork?

"Social networks play a part," said Prof Kallen. "There has always been contact between Ireland and North America, and I say North America in particular, because if you take Newfoundland in Canada, the accent there sounds extremely Irish due to the amount of migration from the south-east of Ireland."

But it is also because US English is now the top global quality of the language, replacing British English as the gold standard.

"US English has taken on a global quality. More Scandinavians are speaking English with American accents, people who work with global English will speak with an American accent. It really belongs to the world," he said.

He added that these accents can become more normalised when we hear them on TV.

"We're used to hearing it on television, so it's not so strange to adopt it in real life. But TV is scripted, so it is not natural speech."

Prof Kallen compared the widespread trend to that of the "Dortspeak" accent, which took hold among Irish teenagers nationwide, despite being considered a Dublin 4 accent.

"Ten or 20 years ago you had the 'Dortspeak' accent, which had features of what was regarded as Dublin 4, but it was certainly not restricted to that area," he said.

"There were people on the northside of the city with that accent. It became an east-coast accent. This is a similar phenomenon."

Sunday Independent