Switch to which? Does it work to have ‘two accents?’

In the middle of my Boxing Day slump on the sofa, I glanced up briefly from a pile of leftover pigs-in-blankets to see this piece in the Guardian that immediately struck a chord with me.

Barbara Speed describes, in a brief and lighthearted way, her childhood experience of moving between Britain and the US and trying to keep two accents going - English at home, out of loyalty to her English parents, and American at school, to fit in with her peers.

And then, years later, living in the UK but with old friends from America coming to visit, she dared to drop the American accent once and for all.

It got me thinking. Does it work to have 'two voices'? Or do you have to settle for one sound, one accent, in order to truly be yourself?

All this brought back memories of my early life and my ever-changing accent.

Canadian? English? or both?

I was born in Canada, and when we first moved to England in the mid-80s, my Canadian accent melted away fairly quickly - I just adapted, the way young children do.

When I returned to Canada aged 11, my English accent was something people noticed. It wasn't unpleasant: kids in my class used to get me to say the word 'doctor' because they liked the way it sounded.

Nevertheless, like Barbara Speed at her US school, I didn't like being the kid who talked funny. So this time I deliberately adapted - but unlike Speed, I didn't consciously switch, and try to sound English at home.

My accent didn't finally 'settle' until we finally settled - as a family - in Britain when I was 13. I've written before about how this time I was mocked for sounding different, and how this speeded up my adoption of the English accent that is now my default sound.

If you have the kind of accent that people around you notice, and make comments about, then is any of this sounding familiar?

Code-switching

We all do it - even people who don't stand out from the crowd accent-wise, subtly shift the way they sound depending on who they're talking to. Think about the way you answer the phone for work, compared to the way you answer the phone to your kids, your mum or your best friend.

Ditch the slang: young people are sometimes expected to ‘code-switch’ to a more mainstream way of speaking

But this is different to what linguists call 'code-switching' - alternating between two different ways of speaking, often with different vocabulary as well as pronunciation, depending on your surroundings and audience.

Code-switching is commonly discussed in relation to young people, who might have a distinctive style of speech among their friends and peers, with its own slang, its own verbal etiquette and its own sound - a style which is considered not appropriate for use in a more formal situation among speakers of standard English - like a job interview.

(There's some fascinating and very accessible discussion of code-switching and 'style-switching' in Prof Rob Drummond's recent book on accents, You're All Talk, which I've reviewed in the blog.)

Code-switching is a bit more significant that simply remembering not to swear in front of your grandma. It often means a drastic change in accent and pronunciation, as well as dropping the slang in favour of standard English vocabulary.

This is why it's often controversial. As Speed says, 'the way you speak defines you'. And the feeling is often that when you switch from 'your' accent, in order to accommodate a given audience, you are allowing that audience to (re)define you - in ways that might be uncomfortable for you, or unjustified.

As a child, Barbara Speed tried to code-switch, but it became unmanageable - and it took a long time for her to be comfortable adopting a single linguistic identity. Happily for her, her American friends readily accepted her British sound.

But that's just one person, one situation. What's going to work for you?

‘Be yourself’?

The advice is always, 'be yourself.' But what if 'being yourself' is complicated? What if you were born somewhere else, and you've been in the UK so long that you feel British - but your accent tells people that you're still 'foreign'?

This is the case for most of the people I work with on accent reduction. They've been living and working in the UK for many years. They have often taken UK citizenship. Their spouse is British. Their children are British, and sound British. They FEEL like they belong here - the only thing that makes them feel out of place is when people hear them speak, and say 'where are you from?'

But they don't want to speak with a voice that isn't theirs. They don't want to code-switch between their personal world, where their accent is accepted, and a world where their accent is used to pigeonhole them. They just want their accent to not be the first thing that people notice, and the only thing they remember about them.

So if you come to me for accent reduction, or even to work on other aspects of your speaking like tone, pace and expressiveness, you might be surprised to learn that I won't tell you how you should speak. I will help you to be able to choose - are you going to have two voices, one 'for home' and another 'for work'? (This works for some people).

Or are you going to gradually take your current sound in a more typically 'BBC English' direction, so that no matter who you talk to, you are sounding a bit different, but still feeling like yourself?

Whatever goal we end up working towards, I promise you won't find yourself in a predicament like the young code-switching Barbara Speed - American schoolfriend and English parent in the same room, and desperately trying to only use words that sound the same in both accents! As she says, it's 'about as straightforward as using a keyboard that’s missing the letter E'.

The most important thing is to say what you want to say, and be heard.

Thanks for reading. I hope your 2024 looking bright, and I look forward to bringing you more useful and engrossing stories on everything to do with speech, pronunciation, effective communication and accent.

Bye for now :)