When you pay close attention to bilingual Londoners, something strange happens. A teenager from Tower Hamlets who speaks Bengali switches between Sylheti and English with ease, but her English has a glottal stop and a distinctly East London vowel shape. Her grandmother, who immigrated decades ago, also speaks English, albeit haltingly and with every syllable laced with Bengali prosody. The two languages are the same, but the accents are completely different. The distinction goes beyond cultural differences. It’s neural.
Accents are a decorative afterthought of language, but neuroscience has only lately started to treat them as a legitimate subject of study. Linguists treated pronunciation as a type of surface noise and concentrated on grammar and vocabulary for the majority of the twentieth century. That opinion has changed. A vast network of brain regions, including the auditory cortex, motor planning areas, the left dorsal insula, the anterior cingulate, and the cerebellum, are involved in both producing and perceiving an accent, according to research using fMRI and event-related potentials. It turns out that accents are costly from a neurological standpoint. And those expenses increase in a bilingual brain.
Even though it isn’t always referred to as such, London is an especially intriguing laboratory for this type of research. In addition to accent traditions like Cockney, Estuary English, and Multicultural London English, which are all constantly changing, the city has over three hundred languages spoken within its boundaries. It takes more than simply switching between two vocabularies for a bilingual speaker to navigate this terrain. Whether or not they are being used, their brain is simultaneously managing conflicting sets of phonological rules, rhythmic patterns, and articulatory habits. Both languages are always “on” in a bilingual mind, according to research from the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and other places. Through a process known as inhibition, the brain suppresses the one that is not currently required, but suppression is not perfect. Slippage occurs. Accents bleed.
This is the point at which it becomes truly fascinating. The left dorsal insula becomes more active when bilingual speakers try to pronounce words with a non-native accent, according to fMRI studies. This area is involved in the integration of working memory and attentional resources as well as the fine motor programming of speech. To put it another way, creating an accent is not passive mimicry. It requires cognitive coordination, combining motor sequencing, auditory memory, and real-time self-monitoring. Every time a bilingual Londoner switches between, say, Multicultural London English and Yoruba, the brain must adjust its entire articulatory plan.
Although the evidence is not as clear-cut as popular belief suggests, there is a sense that the age at which a person learns their language matters a great deal in this situation. Bilinguals exhibit higher gray matter density in the left inferior parietal cortex, with the effect being more noticeable in those who acquired their second language later in life, according to research from University College London. In contrast, early learners typically develop more flexible vocal motor pathways, which facilitates the acquisition of native-like accents. However, “easier” is a relative term. With no discernible accent, Korean adoptees who were raised in France from an early age displayed brain activation patterns that were identical to those of monolingual French speakers, indicating that even a well-established first-language accent can be totally erased under the correct circumstances.
Another window into the puzzle is provided by musicians. Particularly when it comes to foreign accent imitation tasks, vocalists perform better than both instrumentalists and non-musicians. This raises the question of whether singing’s motor act strengthens the same circuits that control accent flexibility. The informal vocal training that is prevalent in London’s grime studios and gospel churches may influence bilingual accent results in ways that have not been quantified.
The extent to which neurological stubbornness and social performance—identity worn on the tongue—account for accent retention in bilingual Londoners is still unknown. After all, the brain doesn’t function in a vacuum. The family kitchen, the classroom, and the street are all audible to it. It’s difficult not to feel that neuroscience is still catching up to what the city already knows instinctively—that accent is not decoration—when you watch young bilingual Londoners code-switch with surgical precision, changing language and accent in a single breath. It’s architecture. Additionally, the blueprints are constantly being revised in a bilingual mind.
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