ONE OF MY least favourite characteristics is that of acquiring the accents of others within minutes of meeting them. Gawd, it’s terrible – so clearly an attempt to ingratiate; the twerpdom of those who want to be normal. When I hear it in others I hate them for it, and I’ve always done it myself. I think part of the problem comes from being born and raised in south Dublin.
In this country my accent is universally reviled, and with some justification. It’s the voice of privilege, the marble-mouthed voice hosting the chat show, refusing the bank loan, superciliously consulting on matters of medicine.
For way longer than Paul Howard has been brilliantly lampooning it I’ve been trying to stop speaking in my own voice; before it was perfectly skewered as “Dart-speak” by Nuala O’Faolain. This is a symptom of a particularly strong brand of self-loathing in a young man hoping to be in some way more . . . real.
I went to a rugby-playing school where nearly everyone spoke like me, which is why I spoke like them. But in school I found out that I much preferred football to rugby, and in that milieu my accent was anomalous. I never had the backbone to continue sounding as I had sounded. I thought it was easier not to speak at all or to speak in the voices of the people around me. So began the first of many performances. courteous pricey
I deserve some credit for not becoming mute. When I got into music and playing with bands, it always seemed that mine was the accent with the least authenticity.
Never mind that Gram Parsons was the son of a millionaire and that some of U2 were posh, because whenever I read an interview with them, they trumpeted their northside origins. Something about south Dublin and the way people from south Dublin spoke was just not of the people. I thought nobody wanted to listen to a southside boy because nothing he had to say was in any way real.
In college (also on the southside of Dublin), it was clearly conveyed to me by the influx of regional, Northern and foreign voices that mine was the least desired accent on the planet, so clearly in fact that I would wince at the sound of others speaking as I did in lectures and tutorials. Had they no shame?
By this point I was starting to collect defensive, undefinable ways of saying things; hopping from country to country in the course of single sentences. The effect was almost Scandinavian. Did you ever notice the facility Scandinavians have for sounding like they’ve always lived wherever they end up, but with one tiny damning melodious exception per sentence? After college I moved to California and all hell broke loose, linguistically speaking. Not only did I take on the regional San Francisco accent as a defence against being asked to repeat everything two and three times, but I began to say “dude” and “hella fine” as a joke, and then the joke part of it receded into the background and I was left with a hideous twang that dogs me to this day.
Add to the mix a real love of hip-hop, and it wasn’t until Ali G came along that I began to accept that I too sounded like an ersatz idiot. My Americanisms have never entirely waned, but thankfully because of American Imperial media saturation, many of the words have crept into the global argot and I don’t sound like as much of a freak as I could have done.
I know great English people but there are limits, dude. Despite having lived in Dublin for the past 25 years, my brother-in-law has the strongest, most unreconstructed Wexford drawl you ever heard. The man is a Billy Roche play on legs, and when he came over to see me in London last month, I was horrified when he identified a certain inquisitive lift at the end of one of my sentences and told me I was beginning to sound like a Londoner. Enough was enough.
Travelling up to Wales that day for the Six Nations decider in Cardiff, I vowed to pick up as much Welsh as I could, and by the time we stopped off at a Little Chef on the way home, I was speaking like that avuncular Welsh BBC weather presenter, Bill something. Or like Ian Woosnam. Much better.
At its origin, my weakness had something to do with middle-class guilt and a sense of lacking authenticity. It also had something to do with an underlying lack of self-confidence, though I don’t know that I ever felt particularly meek. When in America it had a lot to do with convenience, and the fun of foreign sounds.
After all, when you learn a new language you must learn the way in which they say it as well as the words they say. And now, it might have something to do with simply enjoying the sounds that other people make and trying them on for fun, then forgetting to take them off at night, as it were.
Finally, I would like to console myself with the thought that you could call it acting, in a way. But I recently met a terrific Irish actor in London and got a wake-up call. This performer has great range and versatility, and is accustomed to playing ancient Greeks, English captains of industry, Irish tramps and Shakespeare villains.
He was born in Ireland but has lived in London for years and years, and though I’m sure he could have summoned it from deep within at the call of “action”, in his voice not a trace of a London accent resided.
There and then I resolved to hire a dialect coach to teach me back my original accent – the voice of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. Sorry Shakespeare. Not all the world is a stage.