1 post tagged “speaks like a whirlwind”

Increasingly, I am getting accused of/mistaken for/identified as Australian. Strangers have mentioned that they thought I was an Aussie, or a Kiwi when they met me often over the last year and I have been trying to work out why. The american's that did so were dismissed as just ignorant of what an English accent actually sounds like - as in, we don't all sound like Hugh Grant, you know. Or those fellas from Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels...

But recently, several people have made the same error that should have known better - a couple of ex-pat Brits and some Canadians with English relatives - and it is starting to bother me. I don't want to lose my accent, and I did for some time take pains to avoid trying to imitate the people I was meeting, as I tend to adopt mannerisms when joking with (ie mocking) people and these tend to drift into my language in the form of catch phrases - a lot of the time when making slightly random trains of thought in order to make a bizarre point, or mock someone else doing so, I will tend to do it in an approximation of Vic Reeves accent, as I have always associated that sort of humour with him primarily. But, I tried not to do it when I got here. I found myself softening my 't's a little; saying "Shiddy" instead of "Shitty" and I have tried to stop that, too. It does sound lazy.

Recently, I met up with one of my oldest and closest friends from England, and I was extremely pleased that he commented that I 'sounded more English than when you were back home'. Enormously pleased, in fact.

So why this dichotomy? Why are people that have known me for years saying I sound even more English (never having said I sound Australian in the past) yet strangers all picking an erroneous common origin for my accent? The only possible explanation that I can come up with is the only conscious change I have made to the way I speak since I left; I always used to talk extremely quickly and this often left people having to ask me to repeat things. I always rushed to get my words out so fast, as I couldn't keep up with my thought processes to get the stuff out I wanted to say - kind of like just wanting to get to the best bits and skipping/jumbling up the padding. When I got to the US and to Canada people struggled to understand me, so I made efforts to slow my speaking down a bit. Especially as I often deal with people that don't have English as a first language, I've had to modify how fast I speak. I'm just wondering if, by slowing down, I've subconsciously aped a slower speaking dialect or if, perhaps, I've lengthened certain syllables in slowing down that make me sound more Australian than English. I'll have to pay attention to that, now. Much as I like Australians as a whole, I am a bit proud of being English...