Reply #30: actually, it isn't far fetched

[drmeow]

I started learning languages other than English when I was 5 years old starting with German and Arabic and finally learning Spanish. I have been told that I have a very good accent when speaking Spanish and German (I really don't remember much Arabic) and I pick up accents very easily. My mom (who speaks Spanish, French, and Arabic as well as English) and my sister (who speaks French, Arabic, Hebrew, German, and Italian) also both have the same experience of easily picking up accents when surrounded by them. I was once speaking with a British guy at a party and suddenly out of nowhere said some things with a British accent (both he and I thought it was totally bizarre) - I wasn't trying to, it just slipped out (that was at about 33 years old and after talking to the guy for maybe 10 minutes). As a teenager I spent a week with the family of a friend from Oklahoma and came back speaking with a slight Oklahoma accent. Put me in Britain for a month or two and I'll bet I'd come back with a slight British accent. I have noticed that a friend of mine who moved here from Bath, England 4 or 5 years ago has almost completely lost her British accent ... and she's not trained as an actress as Madonna is (you don't have to be a good actress to be able to mimic accents well). Given that Madonna currently lives in England and thus is surrounded by British accents, I could definitely see her picking it up. Granted, she's not exactly trying NOT to pick up a British accent which some of us sometime have to do (I have had to work at not picking up an accent I particularly didn't like when I lived somewhere and even then I picked up a little of it despite surrounding myself with people who didn't speak with the accent).