Aged five and a quarter, I was facing a conundrum. One term into my British school, where I knew everybody, I was moving thousands of miles across the world to the US, where I knew nobody. The school year was already well under way, which meant everyone would already have made friends with someone who wasn’t the weird expat kid. My odds of fitting in were, to put it mildly, not great.
And so I took action. When school started, I kept quiet as I furiously learned how to speak just like the American kids – to say “flashlight” and “trunk”, “buddon” instead of button, use round northwestern vowels, and uptalk. By the beginning of first grade, I sounded just like everyone else. Unfortunately, with the baffling logic of the under-10s, I had decided that my parents would feel betrayed if I lost my English accent. On top of that, we’d be moving home in a few years’ time – if I sounded American, I’d be the odd one out all over again. So I landed on my genius plan: I’d be Yankee at school and English at home, and neither side would be any the wiser.
My grave miscalculation became evident when a new friend agreed to come over to play. The event would involve snacks (good) and opening the Barbie hair salon for business (very good), but also facing both my English parent and American friend in one car (bad). In the face of catastrophe, I developed the coping techniques I would rely on for the next five years. These ranged from not speaking at all to muttering to my friend so only they could hear, racing upstairs with them at the earliest opportunity, and, if forced to speak, using words that sounded the same in both accents, which is about as straightforward as using a keyboard that’s missing the letter E.
There hasn’t been much research into “bidialectalism”, perhaps because it’s a version of something we all do, to a greater or lesser extent. Marginalised groups in particular often find themselves forced to code-switch; who hasn’t put on a posh voice for a phone call with customer service, or slipped deeper into a regional accent when visiting family? But there is something uncanny about someone having two distinct accents, with no blurriness, or sliding scale. Even I can admit that a clip of John Barrowman switching mid-sentence between an American drawl and a Scottish accent while talking to camera and then his family members is weirdly disconcerting.
But why? The answer, I suppose, is the same reason I was so desperate to sound like those around me in the first place: the way you speak defines you. To have two voices in one language is to sound fake; deceitful, even. The Liverpudlian actor Jodie Comer’s habit of conducting some of her interviews in scouse, and others in RP, has spawned headlines such as “Fans left confused by Jodie Comer’s accent” and “Jodie Comer accent – explained”, as well as an entire genre of TikTok clips suspiciously comparing the two. (The explanation seems to be that she assumes Americans will find RP easier to understand.)
My own problem was solved, for the most part, by moving back to the UK. My parents were pleasantly surprised that I would now speak to them with my friends present. But then came our first visit back to the US. I practised my accent beforehand, speaking quietly to myself in my bedroom to see if I still had the knack – it was still there, but I could hear exactly where I’d gone rusty. On the trip I built it back up again, but the success was deflating. I was back questioning when and whether to speak, always wondering who was listening. Brené Brown once said that trying to fit in is the opposite of true belonging. She probably didn’t have a 12-year-old trying to remember how to say the word “egg” in mind, but she had a point.
A year or two after the trip, some American friends were due to visit us, and I made my decision: enough was enough. Admittedly, this was partly out of necessity, as in the tatters of my American accent, I now resembled an LA-based British actor doing a press junket in a horrible transatlantic drawl.
So, cautiously, I used my British voice, and said “jumper” instead of “sweater”, and “haich” instead of “aich”. If they noticed, no one mentioned it for the first few days. Until, eventually, mid-card game, my friend suddenly looked up, and said “Hey, you sound British now! Go fish.” And that was that.
Barbara Speed is a Guardian Opinion deputy editor
