Losing My Voice
How crossing the Irish Sea stripped me of the sexiest accent on the planet
Moving from Ireland to London is a bit like discovering that you’ve got a tiny magic door inside your house, one that leads to alternate version of your house that’s almost identical, except it’s much bigger and Boris Johnson lives there. Of course, that metaphor starts to fall apart when I consider how tiny my actual London flat is, but it works insofar as London is basically Dublin with the volume turned up, enlarged and expanded and spun out to become something that’s either magnificent or horrific, depending on how you feel about megacities infested by burrowing trains, some of which actually drive themselves.
I love London. I love it a lot, probably because I’m a rudderless shitbag twenty-something with no responsibilities, but this city stole something from me. I moved here eight years ago, at the age of 18, while still young and psychologically malleable enough to allow my surroundings to shape and distort my still developing child-brain. New friends would playfully mock my exotic Tallaght accent, calling me out on every “turty tree” and parroting my sentences back to me in exaggerated brogues. “Shur wud any-wun loike anudder point eh Guinness?” they’d bellow across the pub after I’d offered to buy a drink. “Tee-toh, tee-tah, tee-tay,” they’d gargle cripplingly into the pints I had just bought them with the money I wasn’t making.
It was light-hearted stuff, but it was weirdly debilitating for a timid 18 year old to be so constantly scrutinised, dozens of times per day by so many people. Like the chalk cliffs of the south melting into the English Channel over centuries, my own tongue was being weathered and beaten into shape by geography. It was the result of this imperceptibly slow erosion of my identity when I started softening my dental fricatives just to be better understood in conversation, or to be able to speak without interruption. My trees became threes, and soon after that my p-arr-ks started to sound more like p-aww-ks, until the last pitiful shred of my nationality could only only be found on the front of my passport and hiding in odd syllables.
(Specifically, my pronunciation of the letter R has refused to buckle under the social pressure. I still pronounce it ‘oar’ rather than exhaling a sort of rounded ‘ahh’ like the British do. For the unprepared, my recital of the alphabet includes what sounds like the bizarre phrase “Q or S”, as if I’ve had to ask which letter comes after P. People still call me out on my Rs. Every single time.)
I hadn’t noticed the lingual shift happen until I crept back through that tiny door, back to Dublin, to find it just as alien and foreign as the place I’d moved to. Ireland is now filled with people who mock my audible Britishness. A voice is a deeply personal thing to have taken away from you, and mine is floating somewhere in the middle of the Irish Sea. In London, people who learn that I’m Irish tend to respond with outright disbelief, or disappointment that I’m missing what they see as the most vital component of being Irish. “The Irish accent is hot”, so many people tell me, making me feel simultaneously less Irish and less hot in just five words.
In those moments I want nothing more than to go back and slap my 18 year old self, that guy who was so ready to abandon his own identity to fit in. What a gobshite.
