British accent

After six years in the UK, people still asked why I didn’t have a British accent. I wasn’t convinced I’d ever have one, and the phrase itself was rather vague. There wasn’t just one British accent for me to acquire. My voice had changed, though, even if I didn’t suddenly sound like someone who’d grown up here.

In 2022, I tried an online accent quiz with five clips of people speaking and four possible answers for each one. I went into it admitting I wasn’t good at guessing British accents, then found myself doing better than I’d expected. Thank goodness for multiple choice.

Familiar voices, unfamiliar labels

I’d lived in Kent for the whole time I’d been in the UK, so the voices around me in the South East were familiar. That didn’t mean I could immediately name the accents in a quiz. Even with someone as recognisable as Dame Maggie Smith, I’d never really thought about her particular type of accent before.

The choices helped. For Maggie Smith, I didn’t think the answer was Liverpool, and chose the option marked RP. That stood for Received Pronunciation on the quiz. I was relieved after committing to it, although I hadn’t sounded particularly confident while making the decision.

Cheryl Cole was another familiar name, but I couldn’t have told you much about why she was famous. I vaguely thought she’d been a singer. Listening to her clip, I felt that the answer might be Geordie, the Newcastle option, without being completely sure why that was my instinct.

I ruled out the RP and Cockney options, which left Liverpool or Newcastle. For some reason, I wanted to say Newcastle, so I went with my gut. I was doing better than I’d thought I would, but immediately admitted that without the multiple-choice answers, it would have been a different story.

Sometimes I just went with my gut

Robert Carlyle’s clip made me think Scottish. I attempted an impression, regretted how embarrassing my impressions were getting and was once again thankful for the answers I could choose from.

Joanna Page left me much more confused. I could rule out RP, but thought it might be any of the other options, so I listened to a little more. Even then, I didn’t really know. I eventually chose Welsh, with Liverpool as my next possibility, and was shocked by how the challenge was going.

With the last speaker, Anthony Murphy, my instinct was Scottish again. I wasn’t entirely sure I knew what a specifically Northern Irish accent sounded like, so I wondered whether that could be the answer instead. In the end, I went with the Scottish guess that felt right to me. I was still very surprised by my own performance.

My Canadian voice had changed too

Away from the quiz, I could hear changes in my own voice. If I went back to a video from 2017, I sounded different. I’d aged since then, which was part of it, but my inflection and word choices had changed as well. That didn’t mean I’d started speaking with what people loosely called a British accent.

I didn’t think that was going to happen, although I wondered whether twenty years here might be a different matter. At six years, I could recognise that something had shifted without giving my voice an entirely new label.

The sheer variety of accents was one of the things I loved about being in the UK. From my Canadian perspective, it felt very different: I could think of distinctive voices among French-speaking Canadians and people from Newfoundland, but a lot of us sounded broadly similar to me. Here, there were so many voices to hear, and this little challenge had only offered five.

Watch my original video about guessing British accents and changes in my own voice.