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That is such a good question. https://twitter.com/megandfigueroa/status/1356414252861386752
If I spend an hour or more coaching in another accent, especially if it’s one I have a pretty deep groove carved for, I occasionally do forget to switch back, until reminded, or until I notice myself.
My first deep dive into inhabiting an accent other than my own was when I went to drama school in London in the 90s. My intention at the time was actually to stay and make a career there. (I wanted to do Shakespeare at the National.)
American actors in England were mostly only allowed to play Americans. I didn’t want that. So in order to “pass”, I needed to get my RP perfect. Fully-inhabited, lived-perfect, so that I could take meetings in it, etc.
I knew some other Americans who had done something similar, pretty successfully, and had avoided the only-being-cast-in-American-roles trap. That was inspiring—it could be done. But there was a red flag there, too. To a one, something weird had happened to their native accents.
So I resolved to take extra care to try to try to preserve my native accent. I would speak in RP *most* of the time, in class and in rehearsals, and often in shops and restaurants, but make sure I was my American self at least part of every day.
It mostly worked. I did manage to perfect my RP, and was able to pass as English in meetings, etc. When I eventually did come home and start making a career as an actor in NY, though, I gradually discovered that despite my best efforts, something had crept into my native accent.
It wasn’t really until I started doing commercial v/o work, a few years later, that I was able to fully find my way back. And it wasn’t until I started studying the phonetics and of connected speech that I really started to *understand* what had changed, and then changed back.
I can’t be 100% sure, or course, that the way I speak now is EXACTLY the way I spoke growing up. It would be weird if that journey hadn’t left some mark. But I did take some care, over some years, to really investigate what I do, what I did, what had changed at various times, etc
One thing that may be a little different—I def had a cot-caught distinction growing up (in southwestern CT, near NYC)—but I think it was probably pretty subtle. By virtue of being aware of the cot-caught merger vs. distinction—and teaching it a lot—I think I now make more of one.
I also think I had a few CLOTH words that were in free variation between /ɑ/ and /ɔ̞/. Words like dog and long, mostly. Now they’re solidly and consistently /ɔ̞/.
But for the most part, my accent now is what it was when I was a teenager and a college student. An East Coast version of so-called “General” American (god, what a terrible term that is).
And because of that journey, and how much I’ve had to look into exactly what my native patterns were, it’s pretty easy to find my way back, even if I do temporarily get stuck sometimes in Edinburgh, Memphis, or Cork.
