A Natural Mimic by Petite Anglaise.

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A friend of mine came round for a cup of tea after work and confirmed what I had suspected: Tadpole has a broad Yorkshire accent. Short 'a' sounds (bath, glasses), nice Yorkshire 'u' sounds (mummy) and little phrases ('come 'ere!') that wouldn't be out of place in The Last of the Summer Wine. I have been unwittingly teaching my daughter Northern English.

As far as accents go, I've always been a bit of a chameleon. It's not an affectation: I don't deliberately adopt a plummy 'Received Pronunciation' (BBC English) voice to speak to VIP clients on the phone, or a thick Leeds accent when I see my family there'. I just can't seem to help myself. Whether I intend to or not, I reproduce the accent of the person I'm having a conversation with. I am a mirror of sorts.

I have a very clear memory of answering the phone as a child to a caller from my father's company head office in Dundee. In the space of a two-minute conversation I became Scottish. When I put down the phone, I felt mortified at the idea the lady might have thought I was mocking her accent. However, if you asked me to 'do a Scottish accent' right now, I guarantee it would be abysmal.

Apparently this is a well-documented phenomenon called 'unconscious mimicry'. Most people do it to some extent, and it has implications far beyond accent alone: a person will often adopt the same sentence structure, intonation and vocabulary as another. A form of linguistic empathy, or solidarity. While all children are natural mimics, as this is how they learn, most lose this ability progressively as they reach adulthood, which is one of the reasons why it makes sense for children to learn foreign languages from an early age. Evidently some adults retain a greater faculty for mimicry than others. Whether they like it or not.

The upside of this unconscious habit of mine is that my French accent is near perfect (even if my gender reassigning skills still sometimes give the game away!). It is probably a Parisian accent, if such a thing exists in this cosmopolitan city, although I'm generally poor at recognising regional French accents apart from the very obvious North/South vowel differences. I do frequently get mistaken for a native, which is something I never cease to feel childishly gleeful about.

The downside is that when speaking English with Mr Frog, I adopt a faint, but tragic Frenchaccent. It makes me cringe, but it is beyond my control. Not only do I mimic the Frog's (very charming) English accent, but I also reproduce his grammatical errors. Now that's what I call solidarity.

All in all, I suppose I should be thankful that I am naturally inclined to speak to the Tadpole in this dreadful franglais, given that she is as near to a linguistic clean slate as you can get.

I can definitely live with her being bilingual in French and Yorkshire.