A small experiment involving Antarctic winterers found that months of intense social contact and isolation can subtly change the way adults pronounce words.
Researchers followed 11 people from a 26-member winter crew at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station. The volunteers were recorded before reaching Antarctica and four more times between March and August 2018. By the end of the winter, some of their vowel sounds had shifted and their pronunciations had become slightly more similar to one another.
Not all 26 were analyzed in detail, but a core group of 11 “winterers” had their speech recorded repeatedly to track subtle shifts in pronunciation. The researchers asked them to read 29 common words (like food, code, flow, hid) every few weeks for six months. Each session lasted around 10 minutes and was repeated four times at roughly six-week intervals.
The participants (a mix of scientists, engineers, doctors, chefs, and support staff) were asked to read aloud as naturally as possible. Their recordings were later analyzed at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS) at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich.
Subtle changes indicating the rise of a new accent
Accents don’t develop overnight. Typically, it takes generations before a new, stable dialect emerges. But researchers noticed something fascinating: after six months of isolation, participants were already pronouncing certain vowels differently.
For example, the “ou” sound in flow shifted to a slightly more fronted pronunciation. Other vowel and consonant changes also appeared, though so subtly that even the speakers themselves didn’t consciously hear them.
The study also revealed convergence: participants’ accents grew more similar to each other over time. In one case, a German participant began to sound strikingly more like her British colleagues. Another participant, who arrived with a strong Welsh-inflected English, left Antarctica sounding closer to a Scouse (Liverpool) accent.
“It was very subtle, you can’t hear the changes.” However, “if the winterers were to have children, like the settlers on the Mayflower when they went to America – the accent would become more stable,” Jonathan Harrington, one of the study authors and director of the IPS, told the BBC.
Antarctica has no permanent, multigenerational population to carry the same speech patterns forward. Each arriving winter crew brings a different mixture of accents. What Harrington and his colleagues captured was therefore something closer to accent formation in miniature — measurable adjustments that might, under very different circumstances, accumulate into a lasting dialect.
However, it wasn’t just the birth of a new accent that surprised the researchers. They found that while living in Antarctica, people had also developed some new and unique slang. For example, when the stationed people notice a clear and blue sky in the morning, they will call it a “Dingle day.” Tea or coffee break is referred to as “Smoko,” collecting debris and litter is “Fod plod,” and wearing a “Fox hat” means it’s movie night at the base.
By its nature, jargon is exclusive. It creates a linguistic boundary between those “in the know” and outsiders. This reinforces the group’s unique identity, forged through a shared experience that is difficult for outsiders to comprehend. As one former winterer noted, he could “construct sentences that would be gibberish to most people but clearly understood by ‘ice’ folks”.
How other accents fit in
Researchers and other staff who spent months in Antarctica are very isolated. They only have their colleagues to socialize with face to face. Satellite phone calls are very expensive and only made once in a while. So the stationed individuals spent most of their time working and talking to one another. This close-knit group isolated from others may explain the formation of a new accent.
For instance, a German woman stationed at the Rothera Research Station began to speak like a native English speaker as she talked more and more with her colleagues from the UK.
“One of my friends there spoke Welsh as his first language and had a really strong accent when he spoke English. By the end of our time there his accent had become more like scouse (an accent from Liverpool in England),” Marlon Clark, a researcher and one of the 26 study participants, said.
This is very similar to how people who migrate to large cities like New York or London eventually start speaking like natives. However, while doing so, they often add a touch of their own language and tone, giving birth to new dialects and accents over time. An example of this is Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect that took shape in the 1980s when London witnessed a large number of immigrants.
However, unlike many people who migrate to large cities, people who visit Antarctica don’t spend a long time or settle there permanently, making the emergence of a new accent in Antarctica a rare discovery.
Each winter crew is different, which means the accent changes don’t accumulate year after year. Instead, every season becomes its own linguistic experiment — a reset button for accent evolution.
Not without precedent
The incipient linguistic changes observed in Antarctica, while captured over a brief six-month period, are not without precedent. They represent the first moments of a process that has played out countless times throughout human history, leading to the diversification of languages and the birth of new dialects.
While the “Antarctic accent” may sound surprising, it’s not without precedent. History is full of cases where small, isolated groups of people forged entirely new ways of speaking.
One of the best examples comes from Tristan da Cunha, a remote island in the South Atlantic settled in the early 1800s. Cut off from the rest of the world for more than a century, its tiny community blended British, American, and St. Helenian English into a unique local dialect. Over time, unusual features emerged — for instance, “we was” replaced the standard “we were.” This type of simplification and leveling is a classic hallmark of new dialect formation.
An even more dramatic case is Pitcairn Island, where English mutineers from the HMS Bounty settled with Tahitian partners in the late 18th century. Their children created a brand-new creole, Pitkern, mixing English vocabulary with Tahitian grammar. Later, when many of the families were relocated to Norfolk Island, their speech diverged again into a related but distinct variety, known as Norf’k.
What these cases show is that language can shift quickly when communities are isolated, densely connected, and forced to adapt. Antarctica is unusual because its communities are temporary and made up only of adults — so the changes never stabilize across generations. But the parallels remind us that what’s happening on “the ice” is part of a much bigger story of how human speech evolves in extreme environments.
Updated September 29, 2026: This article was originally published on March 15, 2025. It has been revised to clarify the size and timing of the Antarctic study, distinguish measured findings from participant anecdotes, add important limitations, and include newer research on how adult speech changes over time. This update is part of ZME Science’s ongoing effort to revisit older articles and ensure they reflect the best available evidence and current scientific understanding.
