England won’t change me

I still did the maths in my head when I saw 16:00. Four in the afternoon. Five years of living and working in England hadn’t changed that instinct, and I wasn’t sure it ever would.

In 2021, I’d already talked plenty about the British slang and habits I’d picked up since moving from Canada. There were also things I’d stubbornly kept. Some were little words I couldn’t comfortably say, while others were the way I thought about time or the sound of my own voice.

My head still worked in twelve-hour time

The oven clock defaulted to twenty-four-hour time, and I saw it on train and bus schedules and TV listings. When a time was written that way, I automatically converted it into twelve-hour time. It was just instinct, rather than something I’d decided to keep doing.

That didn’t mean my British friends spoke in twenty-four-hour time. My example was arranging dinner. I wasn’t expecting a friend to tell me we’d meet at 18:00; they’d say six in the evening. In my mind, though, I kept converting the written times. I hadn’t switched over after five years.

I hadn’t started saying “quarter past” or “half past”, either. To me, saying quarter past felt like more effort than just giving the numbers. I’d say six-thirty, four-twenty-five or three-fifteen. Those were the words that came naturally, even though I heard people around me use half past and quarter past.

Then there was “fortnight”. I understood it meant two weeks, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it. I just said two weeks.

A greeting I couldn’t comfortably say

“You all right?” was another one. I heard it as an almost automatic greeting when people saw each other, passed someone or got help in a shop. As I understood it, it was often a polite greeting rather than a request for a completely honest account of how things were going.

I knew all that, but I thought it sounded so dumb in my accent that I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Maybe after ten years in England I’d be able to say it confidently. At the five-year point, no. It wasn’t comfortable coming out of my mouth.

My voice had changed, but it was still mine

People left comments asking why I didn’t sound more English after so long in England. I had a problem with the question, because the accents I’d heard across England and the UK were so different and regional. Saying “an English accent” was an easy shorthand, but it wasn’t one single sound I could switch to.

I honestly didn’t think a complete change of accent was going to happen for me. My voice was so much of who I was. Perhaps living somewhere new for a very long time might change it, but as an adult I thought suddenly speaking with a different accent would be very difficult.

That didn’t mean my voice had stayed exactly the same. If I went back to my old videos, I could hear a difference. I was younger then, which was part of it, but I also thought there was an English influence. My tempo, cadence and word choices had certainly changed since moving here. I still didn’t have what people were calling an English accent, and I thought I probably never would.

Words I was still refusing

“Whilst” felt posh and proper to me, depending on who I heard saying it. Even saying it while filming felt difficult. I couldn’t explain why that particular word seemed so strange in my mouth, but I wasn’t using it.

And I was keeping my Canadian distinction between pants and underwear. What people here called trousers were pants to me, while underwear was underwear. I wasn’t going to elaborate on that one. I’d changed a lot over five years in England, but there were still ways I’d stayed stubbornly Canadian, and I was interested to see what might change over the next few years.

Watch my original video about the words and time habits I had kept.