"Where are you from?"

What your accent says about you.

I get asked a lot — more than I ever did when I had my “original” accent — where I am from.

I have confessed here before to being one of those potentially annoying folk who talks to everyone. Especially, when out with my dog(s). But, to be fair, other dog folk tend to be a chatty bunch too, so I don’t think I come across as quite as unhinged as it sounds.

Once I get chatting to people, I very often get asked where I’m from, them trying to place my accent. Instead of replying with the answer, I have learned to bat the question back with “where do you think I’m from?”

The answers rarely vary, though I have had some interesting guesses.

80% of the time, people guess “the West Country”. For those not in the know, or not from the UK, this refers to an area of southwest England, and includes the counties of Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, Somerset and the city of Bristol. However, it is argued, that each of these distinct areas, and parts within them, have very different accents and dialects. Certainly, if you are from a part of Cornwall, you will know that a person from Bristol has a very different lilt to yours.

But, for the sake of brevity, and less specificity, “the West Country” accent is characterised as “rhotic” — the /r/ sound in words is pronounced in all positions, whereas many other accents drop it, say at the end of a word if the following syllable isn’t a vowel. Scottish speakers say ‘car’ differently than Londoners.

Scottish accents, Irish, Canadian and most American, are examples of rhotic accents (notably, however, the Boston accent is, off the top of my head, one that is noticeably non-rhotic — think of Matt Damon saying “park your car in Harvard yard” and you’ll know what I mean), each having that identifiable /r/ sound.

There are other aspects to the West Country accent — they use glottal stops, they drop ‘h’s, and lots more — but it is a fairly distinctive, recognisable accent. It’s often thought of as a more rural accent, rather than urban.

But it’s not where I am from.

At first, I was kind of offended that people thought I was some yokel¹ who drove a combine harvester and sang along to The Wurzels, and it’s not something I hear in myself, so I was also really confused.

What they very rarely guess is actually where I am from, and that is attributable to certain things. I moved to London in 1990, and quickly tired of people asking me to spell things when I spoke to them over the phone, my original accent seemingly too removed from ‘actual’ English. I really got fed up of them thinking my name was Key. That one pissed me off more than anything. Who the fuck would name their child Key?

I’m from Scotland, more specifically, the north-east-ish part. Equidistant to both Perth and Dundee, but the accent a million miles from the renowned Dundee twang.

I went to university in Edinburgh, so it wasn’t until I moved to London that I encountered any ‘problems’ with how I spoke.

As soon as I landed in Muswell Hill, I got asked to repeat everything, confused people with using the phrase “just now”, and I ended up deciding that if I didn’t want to start punching people, hanging up on them, or having a heart attack, I might do well to ‘anglicise’ my accent.

With a Masters in linguistics, I had a fairly well-trained ear for phonetics, so I would bend my tongue away from its usual placements to approximate the voices I heard around me. I didn’t want to go as far as adopting a faux-London accent — the horror! But I did want to stop people pissing me off on a daily basis.

People stopped asking me to spell things, they finally realised my name was Kay, not fucking door key. It took a while, but I finally bristled less when I had to pick up the phone.

But this ‘anglicisation’ of my accent has ended up with me sounding more West Country than anything else, apparently. But once I tell them where I actually hail from, they suddenly “hear” it. And whenever I go back to Scotland, or am even around Scottish people, I have been told my accent falls back into its old ways.

I don’t hear it. I have no consciousness of it, and its switches. But do any of us actually really “hear” our own voice as it is?

I have heard so many Americans tell me that they don’t “have” an accent, when clearly, we all do. But they hear themselves in all the voices around them, in one homogenous cacophony, and only those whose phonetic pronunciations differ vastly seem to them as people who “have” accents.

As I have mentioned many times before, my interest in sociolinguistics has me fascinated by so many interplays between society and our language — our accents, gender, dialects, code switching, slang, social status — all incredibly interesting to me. So, this disparity between how I think I sound, and how I sound to others (more specifically English speakers from England) is a peculiarity that maybe takes up more of my time than it might to most people. Of that, I am sure.

I decided to write about it today, as yesterday, I — with what I consider to be a good ear for accents — mistook a young girl’s Geordie twang for a central Scotland one. Me. A Scot! It sent me down a rabbit hole of comparing accents and how much crossover there is between so many regional accents in the UK, and how many vast differences.

Where are you from?

What does your accent say about you?

Is it ever mistaken for something else?

Am I the only person who fucking cares²?

1. I kid, I kid… or do I?

2. please do not answer that!