Prince Harry's American accent could be a way to 'fit in', experts claim

In recent appearances, Prince Harry’s aristocratic tones seem to have increasingly taken on an American twang. “It sounds like Prince Harry is losing his British accent,” commented one Twitter user after a comedy sketch featuring the Duke of Sussex with musician Jelly Roll was posted online.

Several others agreed, leading communication coach and accent specialist Anthony Shuster to speculate that the Prince’s royal upbringing may well have influenced him to adopt an American accent: “Reflecting back what’s in front of you is a social skill,” he said.

However, he added, there’s a generational aspect to Harry’s looser style of speech too: “I think posh youngish men of his generation do talk like that,” he told the Telegraph. “They do call each other, man, they do call each other mate. They do call each other bro.”

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Shuster said older royals have a distinctly "antique" way of speaking: “The King speaks what I suppose most people would still think of as the King’s English. It’s somewhat of an antique sound where there’s not a great deal of space in your mouth.”

Comparing King Charles’s clipped tones with recordings of Harry dating back to before his move to America, he says that while the King’s “well-crafted” diction makes every consonant ring out clearly, “What you’re hearing from Harry in these first few clips is what I tend to think of as a ‘Made in Chelsea accent’.”

But while all of us have picked up traces of US slang through constant exposure to American music and movies, the Prince’s speech seems to be slipping towards the mid-Atlantic more rapidly than average.

Language expert Jennifer Dorman, speaking to Cosmopolitan magazine in 2020, pointed out how expressions such as “awesome” and “you guys” had begun to creep into Harry’s everyday speech.

“It could be that Prince Harry has started to borrow American phrases and words in order to fit in and be understood better by the American press” she said. “This could become so habitual that he uses these words when speaking to Brits and Americans alike.

“Or he may just be mimicking his wife: interacting at a close level with someone all the time can cause us to pick up their speaking habits.”