My best mate...
...had moved from Kirkcaldy to Norway, Norway to Essex, by the time he was five. His parents and older sisters kept their accents, although his sisters' softened unless they were angry or excited. The only trace of his accent when I met him, at the beginning of college, was a slightly exaggerated pronunciation of the H in words like 'what' or 'why'. Apparently, he had only lost the worst of his accent that summer and had sounded as Scottish as his mum or dad until then. When the second Austin Powers film was released,while he was still at senior school, his life became utterly miserable. Being a sturdy, rugby-playing type, he got an awful lot of stick about Fat Bastard. Then he went to uni, joined the American Football team, and jumped up and down on the skinny English opponents. Well played, sir.
(Trauma, Sun 4 Apr 2010, 14:08, Reply)