OR HOW MY ACCENT BECAME A LINGUISTIC STRAY DOG
THAT KEPT FOLLOWING ME HOME
“I’ve watched eyes narrow slightly as I speak; trying to place me. Not in a hostile way – just a puzzled curiosity, like I’m a teabag in the wrong box.”
If you’ve ever opened your mouth in a new country and had someone tilt their head like a puzzled border collie, you’ll understand the portable anomaly that won’t stop narrating your origin story, otherwise known as a foreign accent. It’s like having an invisible parrot on your shoulder that shouts, “NOT FROM HERE!” every time you ask where the toilet is.
Sometimes it’s more subtle; a flicker of recognition that you might have taken a slightly unusual road to get here.
For me, that road began in England, detoured through five other countries, and eventually led to a patch of southern sky I now call home.
I was nine when we migrated from England to Australia, and from the moment I said “dahnce” instead of “dants”, I felt myself become an echo of something that didn’t quite fit anymore.
Kids laughed when I spoke. To be fair, kids will laugh at anything if it means they’re not the one being laughed at, but words that had once curled off my tongue easily started to sound bulky and misplaced, like they’d been through airport customs and weren’t declared properly. I was already shy; now I had a soundtrack of difference.
Accents are clingy. They hang around even when you think you’ve scrubbed them clean. Eventually I adopted the local sound, but there was always a ghost of other places in it. I was living inside a linguistic magic trick: now you see it, now you don’t, now you’re a whole different nationality depending on who’s listening.
There’s something absurd and profound about how an accent can overshadow everything else about a person. Research confirms that people with “foreign” accents are more likely to be seen as less competent, less credible. Even when we say exactly the same thing. I’ve watched eyes narrow slightly as I speak; trying to place me. Not in a hostile way – just a puzzled curiosity, like I’m a teabag in the wrong box.
Now in my 30s, I live in Tasmania and there’s barely a hint of England left in my voice, even despite returning for another 10 years. Occasionally a rogue syllable slips out, like an old friend waving from a crowd, but mostly, I sound like I belong here. And I do, in so many ways. I love Tasmania deeply. It’s where my husband and I are raising our children, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
But in private, when no one’s listening, I still feel British. And Italian. And a little bit of everywhere I’ve ever been. I’m stitched together from the places I’ve lived and the people I’ve loved, and my accent is the thready seam running through all of it. Unpicking it would unravel something essential.
I wish I could tap my nine-year-old self on the shoulder, mid-schoolyard humiliation, and tell her that one day, this thing she’s so embarrassed by will become one of her favourite parts. That it will shape her empathy, her curiosity, her resilience. That one day, her accent will stop being a problem and start being a passport; connecting her to people she never expected to meet. It will make her a better listener. It will become a thread she follows home.
Also, I’d tell her that Australian accents are weird too. Just in a different way.
We treat accents like quirks of geography, but most of them are something else entirely: the sound of someone who’s done the admin, braved the weather, mispronounced a menu item badly enough to get laughed at, and stuck around anyway.
It’s not always obvious. But it’s there. A little wobble in a vowel. A consonant taking its time. The sound of someone who went far out of their comfort zone just to be here, next to you, ordering coffee.
Honestly, I think that deserves a bit more reverence than it usually gets.
Because how lucky we are, to live among people who tried that hard, just to say hello.
