"I don't hate America, Charles, and I certainly don't hate Americans. What I hate is being forced to do things in a certain way here. There's a big difference."
I find this thread fascinating and I can see Chris's points. I think people place the age of becoming aware of one's surrounding's much later than it should be. I'd establish awareness of surroundings much earlier, perhaps at age 7.
I don't have a dual nationality situation, like Chris, I'm American, never lived abroad, but I went to private schools in Southern California through the third grade. During those early years, I can say that my sense of self, thought patterns, and basic education were instilled. Phonetics, probably what the British call elocution, was strongly emphasized, so much so that even today I have a markedly different accent than my fellow Southern California peers, where there's is more "okie", Valley, or Mexican influenced, even though this was established at a young age.
I went from that private school environment, to one where basic reading skills were still being taught in the public school environment, and there was a vastly different "culture", even though I grew up completely in Southern California area, there are vast "cultural" differences between the private and public environments.
To this day, I still feel like I can say "everything I learned, I learned by the third grade" because that education by far exceeded what was taught in the public school system, though those standards would be considered high today. To this day, I feel like I identify with those early years as it was my educational foundation, even though most would feel like a child's brain and identity isn't yet defined until the early teen years. I think that is a wrong assumption.So, I can identify with what Chris is saying in that regard. I can say, however, that I read a few message boards of Americans who have moved to Britain, and I can say that even among adults, there is a strong pressure for them to comform to British standards, and move away from their "broad" American accents. I remember one story of a man talking about eating a taco, rhyming with "awe", and he was rebuked by his otherwise friendly landlady who informed him that the "proper" way was to pronounce it was to rhyme the word with "fat" - as in "tack-o", and that "he was in Britain now".
It's fascinating to read about Americans in another cultural environment. And, many of the American kids still identify with their nationality. I notice though that among the kids born there or raised there from an early age, say three years old, tend to identify as British, and the American parent as a "foreigner". But, once they are say 8 years old, they tend to keep their American identity judging from what I've read.
Larry