Talk like me

Sophie is in the garden playing netball with one of her friends, and I'm struck by how her accent changes depending on who she's talking to. She's gone all london-y at the moment - no t's. She's always been quite easily influenced in that way - when she was five her best friend was Indian, and she developed a very strange South African/American/Indian twang. These days, I tend to forget that I have an accent myself - it sometimes surprises me when people ask where I'm from. And I still often use the wrong words - discovered last night, for instance, that people here don't refer to ATMs. I guess because I know what they mean when they refer to "cash points" I hadn't actually ever registered that they never refer to an "ATM". I think my vocabulary problems are compounded by having lived in the US before we moved here - South Africa, the USA and England often have different words for the same thing, and I sometimes get mixed up about which word goes with which country. For instance, it's a jersey in South Africa, a sweater in the US and a jumper here.
Tank tops over here don't look like this, they look like this. Then there's dhania, cilantro and coriander - all the same thing. And brinjals, eggplants and aubergines... I think I must gradually be acculturating to life here, though - these days I can say "jumper" with a straight face. For ages, it sounded so odd to me that I couldn't say it without making little quotey marks with my fingers.