Learner Dad: We ended up in isolation over Christmas and watched lots of YouTube

My daughter spent a lot of time watching American kids on YouTube and her Cork accent is ‘todally’ gone

Picture: iStock 

I like my daughter’s American accent.

She’s been pronouncing totally as ‘todally’ for a while now and using it three times in the one sentence. It’s totes Californian. She also has an uptalk twang. For the uninitiated, that’s the tendency to go up a note on the last word of a sentence. It can be hard to detect in Cork people, because we’ve been doing that since 1782.

But it’s unmistakable in my daughter now. We ended up in isolation over Christmas, and let’s just say the kids got to watch a lot of Kids YouTube. As far as I can see, there are two types of people with shows on Kids YouTube. The first is multi-millionaire man-children who make their fortune by recording themselves playing video games such as Roblox and Minecraft. If you hear your child talking about Preston, you know what I mean. The second type of presenter on Kids YouTube is 12-year-old American girls with galactic levels of confidence, even for an American. My daughter spent a lot of time with that tribe over Christmas, and her Cork accent is ‘todally’ gone.

 I particularly like the way that everything is a YouTube video for her now. So if I ask her to get the milk out of the fridge, she says ‘So hey guys, my Dad just asked me to get the milk from the fridge right now’. And yes, she goes up a note or two on the last word of that sentence.

She’s come a long way since her first steps on Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork, at the age of two. We took her in to parade her in front of everyone because we thought that the people of Cork would be enthralled by our lovely girl. (They weren’t. They had kids of their own.)

Anyway, after a few steps, I said she had to come back up in my arms. She replied with a ‘No’ that was so Cork, you could nearly smell the drisheen and Tanora off it.

Now it would probably be ‘Like, todally no way.’ And I don’t mind. There is a bit of sadness that she has moved away from her roots and it can sometimes feel that there is a person from YouTube living in my house. But they’re her tribe now.

Kids don’t talk like their parents. I’m not sure they ever did. My mother mocked me in the early-80s when I started using the word guys instead of lads. (Mockery was the main source of discipline in our house growing up, I’m not sure I’d recommend it.)

In fairness, there was a time when someone adopting an American accent was a sign of moral weakness. A lot of us pitied the guy in our class in college who came back with one from his J1 trip.  It didn’t help that he started talking about going out for beers instead of pints.

There was an air of moral panic when the DART accent arrived in Dublin in the early 1990s. Cork people proudly announced that it could never happen in Cork. Until it did. I still remember the day I heard it first, in a cafe in Cork in the early 2000s.

And now it’s everywhere. Most people who grew up with the internet have an American inflexion. Trying to fight it is like trying to fight the tide. Or the rise of rock and roll. Because Irish kids speaking with an American accent is just their way of saying you can’t control everything about us – we have our own culture and you’re not invited. (Which is just as well, because I’m too old to switch.)

My son just came in there and told me about something that happened in a video game called Cursed Island. He told me this in an American accent. He went back to an Irish accent when we started talking about his breakfast, but there were flecks of uptalk in there as well.

He’s on his way over to the dark side now. Except it’s not really the dark side. It’s just a new generation doing things their own way. It’s no biggy.