A study of 26 individuals who stayed at the Rothera Research Station in Antarctica for six months in 2018 reveals that living on the frozen continent can change people’s accents.

The study authors performed an interesting experiment in which they asked the “Antarcticans” to record 29 words they use regularly (like “food”, “code”, “flow”, “hid”, and so on) every few weeks for six months. 

“Four re-recordings were made at approximately six weekly intervals in Antarctica from the same winterers, each recording session took about 10 minutes.”

The recording included the voices of “A chef, a doctor, an electrician, an IT engineer, a plumber, and a mechanic as well as several scientists and support staff. They were asked to talk normally as if they were reading the words for a friend,” the study authors note. 

These audio samples were then sent to the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS) at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich for analysis. Here’s what the recordings revealed.

Subtle changes indicating the rise of a new accent 

Accents don’t develop overnight, they develop in stages over a long time. So if a person is going through a change in their accent, it will take generations before the new accent becomes noticeable, according to the researchers.

However, there are phonetic characteristics and computer models that can predict the early stages of this change. For instance, the recordings revealed that after six months the stationed individuals were pronouncing the sound “ou” (in words like flow) differently than earlier. Changes were also noticed in the way they expressed other vowels and certain consonants. 

Surprisingly, the participants weren’t unaware of these slight changes in their accents.

“It was very subtle, you can’t hear the changes.” However, “if the winterers were to have children, like the settlers on the Mayflower when they went to America – the accent would become more stable,” Jonathan Harrington, one of the study authors and director of the IPS, told the BBC.

However, it wasn’t just the birth of a new accent that surprised the researchers. They found that while living in Antarctica, people had also developed some new and unique slang. For example, when the stationed people notice a clear and blue sky in the morning, they will call it a “Dingle day.” Tea or coffee break is referred to as “Smoko,” collecting debris and litter is “Fod plod,” and wearing a “Fox hat” means it’s movie night at the base.  

How other accents fit in

Researchers and other staff who spent months in Antarctica have no one else other than their colleagues to socialize. Satellite phone calls are very expensive and therefore, are only made once in a while.

So the stationed individuals spent most of their time working and talking to one another. This close-knit group isolated from others may explain the formation of a new accent.

For instance, a German woman stationed at the Rothera Research Station began to speak like a native English speaker as she talked more and more with her colleagues from the UK. 

“One of my friends there spoke Welsh as his first language and had a really strong accent when he spoke English. By the end of our time there his accent had become more like scouse (an accent from Liverpool in England),” Marlon Clark, a researcher and one of the 26 study participants, said.

This is very similar to how people who migrate to large cities like New York or London eventually start speaking like natives. However, while doing so, they often add a touch of their own language and tone, giving birth to new dialects and accents over time. An example of this is Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect that took shape in the 1980s when London witnessed a large number of immigrants.

However, unlike many people who migrate to large cities, people who visit Antarctica don’t spend a long time or settle there permanently, making the emergence of a new accent in Antarctica a rare discovery.