There was a line that always stuck with me from the Up documentary series about the British kids that filmmaker Michael Apted checks in with every seven years (hardly kids, they’re currently 62). Nick, the kid from the Yorkshire Dales who ended up becoming a college professor, heard it directed at him from one of his Oxford classmates, “I don’t associate intelligence with your accent.” Nick had a Yorkshire accent and it wasn’t particularly thick.
For the longest time, I had no idea about the North South divide in England. We have one in the states but we’re far more polite about it. Sure, Americans are incurious, gun-obsessed xenophobes but we’ve got the decency to trash your region of the country behind your back. In England, they openly judge you for it.
(Check below for the North versus South accent. The old guy is London, the other two or Northern, can’t tell if it’s Yorkshire and Mancunian, my ear isn’t tuned finely enough.)
My father was born and raised in Yorkshire in Leeds and Sheffield. Growing up, I knew his accent was British but I don’t remember now if it was Yorkshire. Some of my cousins had the Yorkshire accent, others didn’t. I always wondered if he had one when he was younger and worked to get rid of it. One of the things that I wish I could ask my dad was how much English snobbery bothered him.
For some reason I think my mother had a Pennsylvania accent but if I try to recall her voice now, she didn’t say, “wudder” for “water” or “awn” for “on.” But I recognize it in other people because of her.
Someone recently asked what an upstate New York accent sounded like. I described it as a Minnesota accent turned down half way and then made a little more nasal. A friend from Rochester who also moved to New York once told me that I had a Rochester accent and I was offended. I love hearing it in the voices of my friends when I’m there, I just don’t want it myself.
I’ve always loved the New England accent, I don’t know why. It must have something to do with being born in Maine. When I smell the north Atlantic Ocean or lobster, there’s a deep familiarity there that I assume must all be from infancy. The accent must have come with all that. I imagine the obstetrician who delivered me must have said, “Ayuh, looks like we have a wicked pissah, Mrs. Penty” and a lifelong infatuation was born.
It’s pretty common to hate the sound of one’s recorded voice but can you ever hear your own accent? I know that I only really have a handful of vowel sounds that I use for everything. Kerry, Carrie, carry, Mary, marry, and merry all sound the same when I say them. But, other than that, I can’t hear my own voice. Does anyone really know how they sound?
