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I have been told that I speak essentially General American as far as they could tell by people who have only talked with me over the phone or Skype, but I have been told I have a strong accent by people from elsewhere whom I have spoken with in person. The thing is I do not intentionally speak one way or another, I just do it without thinking.

Since realizing this, I have noticed that my vowels are quite different (I have much less of an NCVS) and I do not elide or assimilate nearly as much and I overall enunciate carefully when I speak on the phone relative to how I speak in person. I do not think I actually speak General American per se, since there are some things that do not change which would change were I to speak GA on the phone. But I speak close enough to GA that people do not notice a difference.

Since then I have realized I also switch in some other contexts like official meetings at work (even though I do not switch when normally speaking with my coworkers). Likewise, I do not really intentionally do this, I just do it without thinking.

So does anyone else do a thing where they involuntarily switch between varieties in different contexts without even noticing it?

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Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

I don't, but my Dad does. My Dad unconsciously affects a Southern accent when speaking on the phone (to anyone) or in person when speaking to people from a lower class. The weirdest part is that he's not from the South; he moved there in middle school and essentially lived in a Northern enclave in the South until high school.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

I believe that's common enough. I grew up speaking with a slight Northern accent ; now I speak unremarkable Parisian French. It wasn't really voluntary; my speech just drifted to what people around me spoke. And I tend to switch back to a Northern pronunciation whenever I speak with someone with a Northern accent.

My father and my uncle speak in dialect whenever they meet; I'm quite sure it's not voluntary either. It's just they spoke to each other since they were kids.

I think for me it is probably a register thing as opposed to attempting to speak like those around me, since I consistently spoke in my usual dialect (even though my vowels, specifically /oʊ/, drifted some under the influence of those around me) when normally talking with my coworkers while working out east in Maryland, where no one else spoke like me, whereas I speak in much more of a GA-like fashion at official meetings right here in the Milwaukee area (of course one could argue that most of the people I work with here are not actually from here).

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Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

For me it's at least partly a register thing. I was a mushmouth child and had to put a lot of work into learning how to enunciate properly during my schooling. So in more formal situations (e.g. conducting business with strangers either in person or over the phone), I have such a tendency to overenunciate that I've even been asked before if I'm European. (Shades of Eliza Doolittle!)

There's also an element of accommodation at work, but I'm more conscious of that because my mother has this to an embarrassing degree. She'll unconsciously imitate an accent to the point where it begins to sound like mockery. So in my own speech, I try to keep an ear out and not go overboard.

This doesn't seem to happen to me in non-native languages. That is, my German accent may vary between Southwestern semi-dialect (if I'm speaking to someone from that part of the Sprachraum) to something approximating Standard German, but I never notice myself, for instance, adopting a Berlin accent when speaking with a Berliner. And I maintain distinción in Spanish regardless who I'm speaking to.

As a kid I spoke much more carefully at home than I normally do now - but with some notable innovations like my pronunciation of sister that, in my informal speech, I have never lost - and then at some point along the way I ended up speaking at some times like complete mush and at other times quite carefully - and by complete mush I mean I elided or assimilated everything humanly possible while still somehow remaining intelligible to people from around here. And switching between the two must have become automatic to the point that I stopped noticing that I did it.

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Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

I'm told by family that my Hebrew (which I'm native but not fluent and almost completely illiterate in) has an American accent. My friends say I have a French or German accent in English, which is definitely not true (the fact that I have never been to either of those countries and have no family there is one sign, and the fact that can't tell which one when those accents are very different is another). I pronounce a lot of words weirdly. I guess there is some Hebrew influence, but I definitely don't have an accent on my English that an Israeli could recognise as being Israeli.

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ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
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