Have they ever explained why Walter has no accent?
Have they ever explained why Walter has no Irish accent?
shareI don't think they ever have (but I might have missed it). I'm guessing that he was so angry with his father and probably the entire country of Ireland that he practiced until his brogue went away, simply for spite and wanting to start fresh. Megan didn't have the accent either. For some people, it's easier to lose a specific accent if they're around people who don't have one so being in the United States probably helped Walter lose his. That's not always the case though... Arnold Schwarzenegger has lived here for about 30 years but still has his.
It's not a function of how long you've lived in a place but how old you were when you moved there.
I'm the youngest of a large family that immigrated from the Philippines to the US. I was 13 when we settled in South Jersey, and I speak with a South Jersey accent. Most of my siblings, who came over after graduating from college, never lost their Filipino accents. I had a friend in college who had immigrated from Germany at 14 and spoke with a North Jersey accent, and I never would've known he was born in Germany if he hadn't mentioned it. Between all the other immigrants I've encountered over my lifetime and having studied child language development as a school psychologist, my rule of thumb has been, wherever you were living when you were 15 years old, that's the accent you're stuck with. That is, the accent you speak with unless you're working hard at masking it in a role-playing situation. (BTW, Lawrence Welk, the swing musician, was born and raised in North Dakota, but in a very insulated ethnic German community where everyone spoke German as a first language.) Walter (the character) was about the same age as I was when he came to the USA.