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When a video of the Duchess of Sussex greeting the public surfaced this week, it was confirmed that the duchess had gained a British accent. It’s a subtle difference, but one can detect a hint of the Queen’s English in the duchess’s intonation .
这周公布的苏塞克斯公爵夫人问候公众的一个视频表明，梅根习得了英式口音。虽然只有微小的改变，但我们还是可以从梅根的语调中听出一点儿标准英语的味道。
“You can hear some sounds changing, yes,” confirms speech and dialect coach John Fleming. “Some examples can be heard in her R sounds at the end of syllables .“
你可以听出梅根的一些音调变了，的确如此，”演讲兼方言教师约翰·弗莱明证实道。“比如从她发某个音节末尾的R音中我们就可以听出来。” In recent clips, those Rs are lighter than the typical general American accent. She is also using the British English vowel normally heard in the word ‘thought’ in the phrase ‘We all had a nice day’, in the word ‘all’.”
在最近的几段视频剪辑中，梅根在发这样的R音的时候要比她一贯的美式口音轻一些。她还使用了英式元音，我们通常会在她说‘thought’（认为）这个词以及说“we all had a nice day”（我们都度过了愉快的一天）这句话中的‘all’的时候能听出她使用英式元音。
People changing accents is often criticised as a sign of inauthenticity. Madonna, for example, was ridiculed when she started talking like her former husband Guy Ritchie.
人们改变口音经常会被指责为不可信的象征。例如，麦当娜开始像她的前夫盖伊·里奇那样讲话的时候就被取笑了。
But dialect coach Pamela Vanderway explains that a change in accent is unavoidable when you start life in a new country.
但是，方言教师帕梅拉·万德维表示，当你开始在一个新的国家生活的时候，口音的改变是不可避免的。
“It’s absolutely normal for a human being to take on the accent of the people around them when they want to belong to that group.”
“当人们想要融入一个群体的时候，他们学会周围人的口音是非常正常的。”
“Accents are one of the ways human beings identify as being part of a group. [In] Meghan’s situation, she is representing the royal family, so she’s part of England. So there’s a particular pull for her to take on that way of speaking [and] she may or may not be taking it on consciously.”
“口音是人们被确定为某个团体的一份子的一种方式。考虑到梅根的处境，她如今代表的是英国皇室，所以她是英国的一份子。因此有一股特殊的牵引力促使她用这样的方式讲话，而且她也许并非有意为之。”
Plus, there’s the matter of the duchess being a trained actor. “She likely has had to work in accents before, British or otherwise. This means that her mouth is a little bit more malleable , and so – in the same way that you might pick up a bit of southern US accent on a trip to Georgia – she has picked up some British English sounds after being immersed in the culture and surrounded by various UK accents.”
此外，梅根是一位接受过专业培训的演员。“她以前可能不得不在工作中讲英式口音或其他方言。这意味着她的嘴巴有更强的适应能力，就像你去乔治亚州旅行的时候你可能就会学会点美国南方口音，而她沉浸在各式各样的英音环境及文化中她也会学会一些英式口音。”
So even if the duchess begins to sound more British, it’s not a question of abandoning her California dialect, but more a willingness to adapt and to belong with her new family.
所以即使梅根的口音听起来更像英国人，这也不是她抛弃了她的加利福尼亚方言，而是她更愿意去适应，去融入她的新家庭。 | 
