I’m a Northerner living in the South, and I find accents really interesting.
When I first moved to Cambridge, I was living in a college with predominantly Southerner peers (there was literally only one other person I knew from the North-West, and he was a Geographer so our paths - with a short ‘a’ - didn’t cross that much). My accent caused some interest and attention in my social circle.
“Say ‘muddy puddles’ again,” my best friend would urge, laughing and trying to mimic me. "Mooouhdy!"
There was a song we sang a lot at CU with a misprint on the acetate sheet (acetate - those were the days!) so it read, “There is a new song in me mouth.” My friends told me it made them giggle and think of me, as according to them I always made ‘my’ sound like ‘me’ anyway.
Once on a group punting trip to Grantchester, a friend phoned to say she’d like to catch us up but she didn’t know how to get there.
“A bus!” I suggested.
The rest of the group were confused.
“What’s abus?” one asked. “Are you speaking Arabic?”
A couple of my closest friends at university were from Northern Ireland, and I sometimes picked up their expressions, like ‘wee small’, which my family thought made me sound ‘affected’ (pretentious). I maintain this is instead evidence of linguistic accommodation (where we naturally mirror the language of those around us - we are 'affected' by each other's speech, like how I sound more Mancunian when I talk to my mum on the phone.)
My accent has gradually become more neutralised (I’ve now lived down here longer than I lived in Manchester) but still draws the occasional comment, especially from my students.
In my first term of my first year of teaching, I was doing a lesson on horror writing, and asked the class to think of words to describe a castle. There was a long pause and then one girl put her hand up to politely ask me what a ‘ca-stle’ was.
“Sorry - a CAR-stle” I corrected myself, and then suddenly lots of hands popped up to give ideas.
Similarly, last week, Year 10 were looking at the witches in ‘Macbeth’ and I pointed out that their lines are short and rhyming, which makes it sound like a song or chant.
“Erm, Miss, is a chant the same as a char-nt?”
So, 22 years living down South and the locals still sometimes find me incomprehensible.
I have also spawned three linguistically flexible offspring.
At first, they (unsurprisingly) sounded like me. When it’s your mum who runs your bath and takes you to play on grass (with a short ‘a’), those are simply how you say those words.
When they started school and I was no longer their main linguistic input, the split began (the split from me, and what is known as the ‘trap-bath’ split).
I was once helping son 2 with his phonics homework, and he was doing the ‘ar’ digraph. The task was to write down words which use ‘ar’, like ‘car’.
Me: How about, the opposite of light?
Son: Heavy? That doesn't sound 'ar'. I know: fast.
Me: Well it does sound like it when you say it, but listen to how I say it: fast. Not farst.
Son: Erm, I know: last.
Me: Listen, I say, last, not larst.
Son: Castle?
Me: How about, when it's sunny, I take you to play at the p...?
Son: Garden centre?
Me: Great, let's go with garden.
Which is one point to the Northern accent, I reckon.
The ages they are now, they are very much their own people, and they sound like their friends more than they do me, which is just how it should be. Their pronunciation sometimes takes me aback, and I have to fight the urge to repeat them, and make fun of them. Isn’t parenting all about encouraging our children to be themselves, and to be independent from us?
A-level English Language is just the most phenomenally interesting subject to teach (it’s nothing like the GCSE; it’s more socio-linguistics) and through self-teaching myself the course content, I have learnt that I am firmly in the ‘descriptivist’ camp, an approach that observes how language is used and evolves, and refers to ‘conventions’ rather than ‘rules’; as opposed to the ‘prescriptivists’ who say that there is a right or superior way to use language, that the internet and slang are eroding proper English, etc. Which is kind of surprising if you saw me with a red pen correcting errors in students’ books, but just as well really as otherwise I’d be writing-off my own less-than-RP accent.
Anyway, I look at my children, at their evolving language, the bits they get from me, the Bible quotations they’ve memorised through songs, the echoes of characters they’ve met in books or watched on TV, their growing vocabularies, the shock the younger two still express about taboo language, and I feel proud of them. They make lovely little linguistic case studies.
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