My Accent Battle
I sound Australian.
Now, I am Australian citizen who was mostly raised in Australia, my family live in Australia, and I’ve lived here for five of the past seven years. It isn’t surprising that I sound Australian. But I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with my accent over the years, and it’s honestly strange to find myself in a place where I sound simply Australia.
When I lived in the US as a teenager (in Greenwich, Connecticut) I was pretty stubborn about keeping my accent, my vocabulary, and my spelling – even if it meant I was marked down in English class! As the only Australian among 3,000 students and staff at my school I could be identified in a crowd by anyone who’d heard any gossip about “The Australian.” Then we moved back to Australia, and my new classmates told me I sounded American.
At age 21 I moved to China. My first few years there I insisted on my Australian pronunciation and vocabulary. It didn’t last. In the English-speaking expat world of Beijing, Americans are everywhere. In particular, very few of the expat youth leaders I worked with were not American, and most of those were Canadian (a similar accent, at least compared to mine).
There’s only so many times you can stop and explain yourself EVERY. OTHER. SENTENCE. Every week, for years. After a while it just wasn’t worth having the same conversations with every American about the different words I used. I started to switch out my Australian vocabulary for American equivalents. It simplified my life. I could continue a conversation without being derailed mid-thought as word choices distracted my American friends. Honestly, this really annoyed me at first. Why did I have to change my speech patterns simply because my friends were unaware of the rest of the world? That may be an unkind thought, but it was how I felt. I resented always having to be the one who adjusted.
America produces and exports SO MUCH media that the rest of the English-speaking world is frequently exposed to American accents. Americans, however, are less exposed to other dialects of English (especially back in the pre-streaming era). No problem there – why would you import media when you have so much domestic product? The result, however, is that while they may think other accents sound nice, many are totally thrown by the different vocabulary. I could usually pick Americans who weren’t long out of their native land – they positively bubbled about how much they loved my accent and how they could listen to me all day. Sometimes it made me feel like novelty entertainment (which rankled) but most of the time I could receive the intended compliment.
Fast forward 2-3 years, and things became more confused. After years of self-editing, American words started to become my default - no longer by deliberate choice but involuntarily. I was teased by Australian friends for this. Even worse, I began to have trouble remembering which word was from which country. I would look at both words in my mind and be unsure which was the Australian word and which the American; by this point both felt familiar and comfortable. I stopped recognising my sisters’ voices on the phone. They would say hi and start talking but their accents sounded so foreign to me I would think “who is this??” – until I caught up a few seconds later.
Combined, all of this was terrifying – no exaggeration. I felt, on some level, that my core identity was slipping through my fingers and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Then I was talking to an English man at a conference I was helping run; upon discovering I was Australian he expressed surprise, as he had assumed I was American. He apologised immediately, but I was dismayed, and angry – not at him, but at the situation. I was angry at being in this position, at feeling helpless. All that emotion bubbled beneath the surface for two more years.
Then I made a biting comment to a friend about how much I hated the fact that I was losing my accent. It was an uncharacteristically emotional outburst, and he asked a simple but poignant question: “Why does this bother you so much?” I was stopped in my tracks. Why DID it bother me so much? Sure, losing my accent made me feel somehow “less Australian” and it wasn’t fun to have friends or family back home tease me about it. But why did that matter? Why was being (and sounding) Australian such a core part of my identity?
As I thought about it, I realised a lot of the emotion came from my experience as a teenage expat. For two years living in the US I was known throughout a huge school as “the Australian girl.” I lost count of the number of times people called my accent “cute”. One friend kept an on-going list of all the different vocabulary words I used. She talked about wanting to go to Australia so she could order “a chicken burger with chips and lemonade” (and get a chicken sandwich with fries and a Sprite). None of this is bad, and no one was ever mean to me about it, but it was tiring. My voice identified me and made me public property somehow.
My last few months in the US I was sooo excited to go back to Australia, to fit in and no longer be “the foreign girl.” Imagine my surprise when I discovered that to Australian ears I now sounded American. Some people started to call me “Miss America.” It was really disheartening. There were some permanent changes to my accent/vocab even at this point – my incessant use of “like” being a big one. I also drilled myself to say “bathroom” instead of “toilet” while in the US, so I didn’t embarrass or offend, but I had trouble switching back when I returned to Australia and was teased for years over it. If I asked where the bathroom was, the tongue-in-cheek reply would often be “Why? Do you want to wash your hands? Or do you mean the toilet?”
As an adult in China, every time I noticed my Australian accent shifting it hit that teenage pain. The accent and vocabulary changes triggered all the angst of both culture shock in America and reverse culture shock in Australia. Back then I was caught in something I couldn’t control (and didn’t understand, or have words for); ten years later it was still controlling my reactions.
Sitting with all this, I realised that the choice to live overseas was the choice of a changing accent. That it was the price tag of choosing an international life. Looking at it from that angle, suddenly everything shifted. Losing my accent was a small price to pay compared to everything I gained living overseas, not least the opportunity to continue my work with Third Culture Kids. This perspective was important in that it recognised that losing my accent was still a PRICE to be PAID. There is an emotional toll that comes with having an accent that doesn’t totally match your passport. But realising it was a choice, and that what I gained was worth the cost, made all the difference in the world.
My accent and vocabulary continued to shift away from standard Australian and toward something more American, but it no longer bothered me so deeply. I found it more entertaining than devastating. I didn’t stress over which words I used - although my inadvertant choices were sometimes a surprise even to myself! I still bristled when mocked for using Australian vocabulary, even in jest (being mocked for using American vocabulary was one thing, but it felt unfair to be penalised for speaking in my native accent!) BUT I no longer felt ashamed when an Australian couldn’t pick where I was from. I was a little wistful at times, but knew I’d made a deliberate choice to prioritise expat life over a “pure” Aussie accent. Once I realised it truly was a choice, and I choice I made willingly, I stopped wasting time regretting what I’d lost.
Now, at the begnning I told you I sound Australian. How did that happen? I’ll tell you the rest of the story in next week’s blog post: My Accent Grief
**
An earlier version of this post appeared on storiesfromtanya.com
