when i was home visiting, i spoke to my uncle bob on the phone. i hadn’t spoken to him in a few years and he immediately said, “wow, you sound really british.” while no brit would ever mistake me for british, i am aware that to many americans, i now sound rather foreign. funny then, that during that same visit, particularly around my brother who has a very pronounced boston-area accent, i found myself elongating my a’s and slipping off r’s. even stranger since, despite growing up in the area, i never had a real boston accent to begin with.

for those who don’t know me well, i suppose it all this sounds deliberately put on, like i’ve made a conscious effort to change the way i speak or appropriate dialect. in fact, nothing could be further from the truth; i have always slid easily into regional accents, slang and mannerisms, without any purposeful effort at all – and sometimes in spite of attempts not to. i can’t help it, it seems – i just absorb them without trying or thinking, for better or for worse.

my speech has gone through several incarnations because of this. as a young adult while in university for a couple of years in montreal, my speech noticably became flatter, more enunciated, and i incorporated the everpresent “eh?” into my daily lingo. (all these years later, i still say it far too frequently!) then after spending the next seven years in new york, my speaking mannerisms became a bit harsher, a touch more nasal, and definitively louder with a tiny dash of abruptness. even now, i continue to say things like “can i get” or “lemme have” as a shortcut for asking politely. after leaving new york and moving back to boston for four years, i eased back into some of the familiar sounds of my childhood – loose vowels and overemphasised ah’s with scattered r’s in strange places. though i’ve never “pahked the cah in hahvad yahd”, i’ve been guilty of slinging around the ocassional dropped ending and subbing d sounds for t sounds. and now, after being in london for nearly six years, i have inculcated the pointedly sharp t’s and sing-songy inflections of british speech, along with a penchant for using the word “sorry” nearly every other second of the day, describing even the most superlative things as “nice”, and phrasing negatives like “did you not?” instead of “you didn’t?”.

what do i sound like now? a strange mish-mash of all of the above. i’ve retained certain elements of all the places i’ve lived, and as a result sound like nowhere i’ve lived. i’m a melange of indistinct accents, peculiar vocabulary and odd cadence. i’m a syntactical mutt with wierd articulation. i can be halfway through a sentence and accidentally say “elevator” even when i have only said “lift” for years. i go back to the u.s. and have to eliminate “queue” from my brain, but still slip up with “car park” and putting “tit” in the middle of everything (”lovely day, isn’t it“?) i am both overly abrupt and overly polite at the same time. and throughout it all, i constantly use “eh?” as if it were a form of punctuation.

so when uncle bob said, “you sound british”, i had to laugh. i do sound british…and also bostonian, canadian and new yorker. all the places i’ve lived have left their mark on me in more ways than one, and i love them all for different reasons. i wouldn’t trade any piece of my life away, and they’ve all profoundly influenced the person i’ve become.

it’s my own unique version of a native tongue – a linguistic reflection of who i am and where i’ve been, every time i open my mouth.

school of language – rockist part 1

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