Having a go: US parents say Peppa Pig is giving their kids British accents
Parents across the US say their children are acquiring British accents, thanks to Peppa Pig.
Linguistic experts have cast doubt on such claims, but some parents insist the “Peppa effect” has their American children saying “mummy” instead of “mommy”, using phrases such as “Give it a go”, and pronouncing tomato “tomah-to”, not “to-may-to”.
The show was popular with the pre-kindergarten crowd before the pandemic but it has experienced recordbreaking demand since US states imposed restrictions last year.
According to data from Parrot Analytics – a consulting firm apparently not named for Polly Parrot, a pet owned by Granny Pig – for a 12-month run that ended in February, Peppa Pig was the second most in-demand cartoon in US households, after SpongeBob SquarePants.
Within the last 30 days, Parrot said, the show generated higher demand than 98.9% of all children’s titles across the US. Compared to its domestic market, audience demand for Peppa in the US is 112% higher than in the UK.
In 2019, Dr Susannah Levi, an associate professor of communicative sciences and disorders at New York University, said she was skeptical about the “Pepper effect”, telling the Guardian toddlers “typically … develop the accent of the community around [them] by interactions, not by watching”.
Levi did concede that children might learn unfamiliar words from a show – including “to-mah-to” and “zehbra” – and thereby in the case of Peppa Pig come to use the British pronunciation.
Across social media, however, Peppa remains in full effect as parents post evidence of their toddlers speaking in British accents.
In one TikTok video posted last August that has been viewed more than 10m times, Dominique Parr, a Seattle-based mother, filmed her daughter Hazel repeating lines from the show including “How clever” and “Oh dear”.
Preetika Rana, a Wall Street Journal reporter, recently tweeted: “My fiveyear-old niece in [New York City] had an American accent before the pandemic. Now she has a posh English accent after spending a year at home watching Peppa Pig. This phenomenon is so widespread that it’s a trending hashtag, #PeppaEffect.”
Rana’s tweet attracted responses from other parents, all detailing Britishisms their toddlers have adopted.
One user replied: “Oh yesss … my daughter commonly uses words and phrases like ‘Satnav, petrol, Can I have a go?’ etc. And for Christmas I had to put out a freaking mince pie for Father Christmas, or, as we call him here in the States, Santa.”