Given the conditions, this is not really a surprise! E.g. whenever someone joins a new group, this individual will try to adopt quickly to the other group members including speech. Plus, the researchers and staff are international!
And it certainly has little to do with the Antarctic winter per se as the title of the research paper suggests!
"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. ..."
From the abstract:
"An acoustic analysis was made of the speech characteristics of individuals recorded before and during a prolonged stay in Antarctica. A computational model was used to predict the expected changes due to close contact and isolation, which were then compared with the actual recorded productions. The individuals were found to develop the first stages of a common accent in Antarctica whose phonetic characteristics were in some respects predicted by the computational model. These findings suggest that the phonetic attributes of a spoken accent in its initial stages emerge through interactions between individuals causing speech production to be incrementally updated."
Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent Antarctica is a bleak, remote and dark place during the winter, but a handful of people each year brave the conditions to live in almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. The experience can change how they speak.
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