I would suggest this is down to innate phonological awareness. Children with speech disorders often have very poor phonological awareness and cannot cope with different accents in the same way as other children – this is particularly noticeable if they have a new TA or teacher from a different part of the country. As they don’t have a well-organised internal phonological system themselves, they can’t quickly ‘update’ their system to accommodate the new accent, and differently pronounced words sound like a foreign language to them.

So I’d suggest that the older son was learning new vocabulary and storing words as he heard them spoken by both parents (he probably had a lot of inconsistencies in his own speech), while the younger son was creating a phonological map and opting for the accent he heard the majority of people around him use.

Somehow Jagger’s drawl kind of worked/works and has been instrumental in creating a unique British Blues /rock and roll tradition which is getting on for 50 years old. A good enough time for a music tradition I think.
On the downside Mumford and Sons affected Irish singing voice has a powerefully oppostite effect on me…actually don’t get me started.
Opera why does the vocal technique demand that ridiculous enunciation or Turbo RP? (cf don’t get me started).

A phenomenon I have noticed on more than one occasion in young people with Autistic Spectrum condition is the affectation of an American or film/TV accent in much of their speech, especially the disaccociated bits.Theres acase study or paper or two there I think.

Sometimes hoew you talk or sing is an individual choice, sometimes the cultural pressure to conform to an accent so as not to stand out must come into play.

I recently watched “Evidently John Cooper Clarke” a fantastic documentary that I know you and anyone with an interest in language and words would love.

Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys recounts in it that hearing Clarke perform was the single thing that enabled him to sing in his own accent.

I’m kind of rambling or Ramblin or Ramblin awn
Will get back to you on havering I suspect you might have done aclassic lyric mishear though
Tim

My neighbour’s children had exactly the same upbringing as you, and they speak English like Londoners, but their Spanish is a mixture of Spanish and English pronunciation. Maybe if you lived in Spain you would soon drop your English pronunciation? I live in France now, and listening to the radio on long car journeys is helping my pronunciation, without me thinking about it too much.
I’m fascinated by this subject, and wonder what you think?
Best wishes
Michael

I’m also thinking of Tony Blair, who seemed to change his accent depending in who he was talking to. If he wanted to sound ‘intelligent and convincing’ you could hear his Scots accent come to the fore, while when he was talking to someone ‘working class’ you could hear him use a kind of ‘Mockney’: where he would drop his ‘h’s and become very colloquial in his vocabulary.

Some people (like me) are very aware of accents and am very susceptible to changing my accent without me noticing. That is very useful when you are learning another language. The ability to listen well may be the ‘magic ingredient’ that determines how well we are going to progress in second language learning.
What do you think??
Michael

Or, as you say Michael, maybe it’s just that local accents are picked up very quickly and children have an incredible facility to recognise and store the dominant phonological pattern – immersion comes not just from parents and playmates but from neighbours, visitors to the house, shopkeepers and a myriad of other people in the community. Maybe this ‘community’ theory could explain why Irish Travellers retain their parents’ accent in the UK, whereas a child hearing only one regional accent does not?