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Have you ever caught yourself talking a little bit differently after listening to someone with a distinctive way of speaking? Perhaps you'll pepper in a couple of y'all's after spending the weekend with your Texan mother-in-law. Or you might drop a few R's after binge-watching a British period drama on Netflix. Linguists call this phenomenon "linguistic convergence," and it's something you've likely done at some point, even if the shifts were so subtle you didn't notice. People tend to converge toward the language they observe around them, whether it's copying word choices, mirroring sentence structures or mimicking pronunciations.

A phenomenon called "linguistic convergence" causes people to subtly change their speech when talking to someone with a different accent. Code-switchers are an example of convergence, but people can also diverge, or go away, from a certain aspect of their speech.