American parents say their children are adopting accents after watching the cartoon, but experts say that’s not quite the case

A British show for children is allegedly warping American toddlers’ speech toward “Mummy” and “to-mah-to,” according to several parents who have recorded their children speaking with an English inflection. But according to linguistic experts, the Peppa Pig effect, first reported by the parenting website Romper, is less a soft-power victory for anglophilia than a normal toddler tendency to mimic new words.

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Peppa Pig, which first aired in 2004, features a town of animals speaking in Britishisms such as “zeh-bra” or “straightaway”. In the Romper post, Janet Manley reported that her two-year-old daughter started calling her Mummy after binge-watching Peppa Pig on a 21-hour trip to Australia.

Other parents have shared similar observations online: “The most entertaining aspect of my life right now is that my toddler has been watching Peppa Pig and now speaks with a British accent,” wrote Twitter user Jess Steinbrenner. NBC Charlotte posted a video of a young girl calling a car “wei-ard” instead of “weird”. Several parents said their kids were pronouncing “tomato” as Peppa would.

jen rofé (@jenrofe) I’d like to thank Peppa Pig for the slight yet adorable British accent my toddler is acquiring. #mum #mummy

News outlets such as the Metro UK and ITV latched on to the wholesale analysis that American children were speaking in British accents after watching too much Peppa Pig.

American kids may have picked up a Britishism or two, but the claim that they’re developing a whole accent based off a cartoon is, according to linguistics experts, likely exaggerated.

Dr Susannah Levi, an associate professor of communicative sciences and disorders at New York University, said that she’s “suspicious” of this idea because “typically, you would develop the accent of the community around you”. For example, a toddler with British parents who lives in Texas will most likely have an American accent.

“You will learn the dialect that’s around you, which is learned by interactions, not by watching,” Levi said.

However, she says, it’s possible kids learn to mimic individual words from the show. Especially in cases where the child doesn’t already know the word – perhaps “tomah-to” or “zeh-bra” – a toddler would learn the British pronunciation.

It’s also probable that many children are mimicking Peppa Pig’s accent because, well, they like it. “Kids at that age are certainly aware of those types of differences and can mimic them, too,” said Dr Lisa Davidson, a professor and chair of linguistics at New York University. Davidson says if it’s not their native dialect, it’s unlikely that children will generate whole new utterances they have never heard before in that dialect. “But they certainly are going to mimic things.”

So while some American toddlers are keen to say a few words or phrases “straightaway” in British English, Davidson agrees that “it’s really unlikely that they’d be acquiring an entire second dialect from just watching a TV show”.