Accent

23 April 2010

I suppose most people think they don't have an accent.

As someone who frequently gets told that he sounds posh, it always surprises me that people think I sound anything at all. After all, I have spent 20 years gradually losing the accent with which I started (though old friends will doubtless tell me I never had much of a Southend accent anyway), and it's difficult to imagine that in losing an accent you are gaining a new one.

I was at a rehearsal this week, and a woman from Dublin announced – pertinently, since we were discussing where in Ireland her character was from – that since she was from the Irish capital that she didn't have an accent. There was a tiny pause as she recognised that there three British people in the room, and laughed as if she had been making a joke. But she wasn't. She meant it.

I live in London and have adopted a Received Pronunciation voice that clearly chimes with “southern and middle class” in the ears of listeners (or even the ears of watchers, I suppose, if they have them). [Someone thought I was a Tory the other day. I thought about beating him to death, but then I thought that being a vicious murderer would make me nearly as bad as a Tory so I thought better of it.] I do wonder if there's something smug about people living in the capital that makes them think that they are at the centre of their country's linguistic universe. It would be interesting to ask someone from Bolton whether they think they have an accent. Are they aware of it?

They probably are. I think it takes a certain amount of smugness to imagine that you “don't have an accent”, if only because the concept of “Received Pronunciation” post-dates the internationalisation of the English language. Therefore even if you accept that RP is an absence of an accent in the accepted English sense, it's still clearly not American or Australian, even if we ignored the howls of protect from Scotland and Ireland, where the bastard tongue of the Anglo-Saxons has been hanging around for centuries.

So I was delighted to hear from a friend that they had seen an advert for an voiceover artist “without an accent”. As my friend said, they might be looking for quite some time.

I still have a nasty habit of changing my accent depending on who I'm speaking to, anyway. You'd think at 38 I'd have finally worked out what I'm supposed to sound like. Dream on.