The English I speak

' stop talking, you're freaking me out!' 

said the twenty-something Londoner, as he grabbed his head with both his hands, for effect, when I opened my mouth to answer a question he had asked me. He was a customer at Temple Bar in the touristic quarter of Dublin, Ireland, where he had wandered in for a pint and I, at the time, was a waitress there. Something in what I said had caught his English composure off guard, though the reason for his surprise had been the how, not the what.

That was 2013. Going back in time to 2006, I see myself in the first English phonetics class I ever attended at University in Buenos Aires, as part of my 5-year teaching course. I can still distinctly remember the teacher  saying 'wotah', because it sounded so strange to me -where is the 'r'?? I thought to myself since I, as a Spanish speaker, would have never failed to pronounce it. That's what we do in Argentina, we roll our rs, thank you very much.  The truth is that I knew next to nothing about accents at the time, much less about those that meant getting rid of the /r/ at the end of syllables, like the one spoken by a mere 2% of  the British population, like some BBC TV presenters, the odd neighbour from southern England, The Queen and other pompous old ladies. This accent, however, prevailed amongst the teachers, who, by the way, were as Argentinian as I was- and eventually I made it my own, by sheer force of habit, I suppose.

In any case, an accent is not only the way rs are articulated, but also all other sounds -and let's not forget about intonation, either. An accent is serious business. It is a letter of recommendation that we extend as soon as we open our mouths and begin to talk, as much as it is a way of identifying others. It is easy to tell if the water of a river is running smooth or rushing, deep or shallow, clear or cloudy -it’s just a matter of watching it run. In the same way, any stream of words flowing from our mouths reveals an association with a certain geographical area, a community,  an age group, a social class, a profession, and dozens of preferences of all kinds. There is no 'neutral' accent and it would be a mistake for anyone to assume that they do not have an accent, simply because that would be like saying 'I do not have a nationality', 'I am ageless', 'I have no friends', 'I have never watched television' and the list goes on. It is impossible to hide behind our accent - or perhaps, it is quite the opposite, and an accent is a great hiding place...

When I first moved to Ireland from Argentina, part of the baggage I took with me was five years of language and literature at university laden with essays on literary works, dissertations on discourse analysis, and an extensive bibliography of books and papers and articles by philosophers of language, historians, literary critics, pedagogues, fiction writers, and the like, most of them in English. By the time I left my copies of Shakespeare’s plays behind and went straight from the world of language teaching to working in an Irish pub in Ireland, my accent forcefully suggested that I was a distant relative of the royals who had forgotten all about decorum and had decided to mingle with the commoners by taking a job as a waitress in Temple Bar.

My accent was fit for afternoons of tea and biscuits in a winter garden, and the bearing and demeanour of my English was, in general, visibly out of place when compared to the earthy English I would hear around me for years to come. I think it'd be fair to say that not a day went by without someone reacting to my accent as I reacted - involuntarily - when a woman asked if I could please warm up her pint of Guinness in the microwave:

'EXCUSE ME, WHAT?'

As if the accent was not enough, there was also my name: -'Queen Victoria - she 's from Argentina but speaks as if she were from Cambridge'. said a bartender born and bred in Dublin,  imitating an accent that was amusingly dissonant amidst the everlasting smell of beer in the bar… mine, of course. Others felt like they had to be a tad more subtle about it, like the Irish bar manager, who once asked:

-'Do your family also speak like that?'

 
His curiosity was genuine, and when I explained they did not, he insisted:

-'And in Spanish, do you also speak like that in Spanish?' 

I knew he meant to say something along the lines of ‘...like you are always presenting a documentary’, and of course the answer to that was  negative, too.

 
-'Your English is perfect, it's better than mine'. said people here and there with a chuckle. It was actually far from perfect, but there was no point explaining any of it, as the accent had a way of getting ahead of me and presenting its false credentials before I had a chance to put in a good word for myself.

There were mixed reviews. While it sounded pleasant and even sophisticated to the ears of some (I know because people told me so), it sounded -in equal measure- pretentious, phoney, and even annoying to the ears of others (as people also made sure to let me know: 'Don't worry, I've heard worse' ). As for me, far from holding a grudge against my alma mater's legacy, I was entertained: 'You sound like... Harry Potter / the Queen of England / Hermione Granger / you've watched Love Actually too many times / you come from the posh end of London '. 

Soon, the way I talked had cast the shadow of a predictable personality: somewhat formal and stiff, extremely prim and proper and -perhaps for that very reason- not very colourful. It was in social situations that I first started noticing how,  if I in any way trespassed the limits demarcated by the type of English people associated with me, I brought about a good deal of confusion.

There's a saying in Spanish that goes 'El pez muere por la boca',
which translates into 'The fish dies because it opens its mouth'.
The English counterpart could be 'Silence is golden', perhaps?

One day, when I was still new in the job at the bar, I happened to join the hen party of one of the other waitresses. We made a night of it, of course, went on a pubcrawl and ended up in a nightclub, where I quite literally danced the night away. This did not go unnoticed as one of the girls could not contain the tone of surprise when, at the end of the night, she blurted out:

-'Victoria, who would have thought!' 

 It had come as a bit of a shock to her that I could be any fun at all.

The wedding that the party anticipated came soon after. When I arrived at the reception, I noticed sidelong glances here and there, and so I mentally reviewed my outfit: not at all as short or as tight or as revealing as Irish girls were used to wearing. However, when alcohol had loosened his tongue, one of the bartenders, a guy from Tipperary, a city west of Dublin, came up to me and, without the filter of sobriety, mumbled:

-'Victoria, I thought you were a quiet one. but after tonight I know you are a whore!'. 

I had only been dancing, but I suspect that to meet expectations I should have been a less energetic dancer, or maybe should have sat demurely at a table, in the way of a great-aunt whose main entertainment might have been throwing disapproving looks their way. After all, that was what my accent said, and  although they knew little about me, they had heard me talk for half a year already.

In general terms, all this accent-related situation used to catch other people off guard, but there was one time when it was I who was caught unawares. Once, possibly a good few months after the wedding, an Irishman walked me home along the bank of the river Liffey after a date. We had been chatting away for hours and we were on the second bar sipping watery cocktails when he said, with a little smile:  

-'You'd make a good public speaker'. 

He had also chuckled with amusement when I mispronounced the word ‘rivalry’.

-'I’ll write that one down, the one mistake'. He said jokingly.

And there it was once again, that version of me whose English was so posh and proper that I could easily be taken at face value for a good, decent and educated girl, but it would take more than just that to believe I could also be good craic.

Anyway, like a a good Irishman, he then politely offered to see me back home and we strolled along the river in the general direction of my place, still chatting in a way that felt quite friendly and relaxed up until I made a comment about Irish people swearing a lot. By way of example, I put on my best (worst) Irish accent to say the f-word, which caused an immediate reaction.

-‘What did you say?’

I thought he hadn’t heard me, so I repeated myself. It had the effect of a magic word. Tall and muscly as he was, he could have been lifting a feather when he unexpectedly turned sideways and lifted me by the waist, so that in one swift movement my legs were straddling his hips. Next thing I knew, we were face to face at eye level in the middle of the deserted street, and he paused for the space of a heartbeat before cracking a smile and saying:

- 'That was sexy'. 

Inadvertently, by using a swear word, I had overstepped the invisible fence that my pristine English had built around me in the past few hours of uninterrupted conversation and, in doing so, I had  brought about an unexpected reaction.

In time and after a fair amount of travelling, I have crossed quite a few fences and this, in itself, has made it impossible for me to keep a spotless accent.  As a result, it is now a specimen of a different species, a mongrel, a cross between posh British English, maybe a sprinkle of Irish and Australian English, with lots of Argentinian and Chilean Spanish in it and even traces of places I have not even been to yet. In exchange, I have learned to use a type of English that sounds less stiff and -hopefully- more natural. 

There are no Irishmen lifting me up by the river these days, but at least it has become less clear to my interlocutors when I first meet them whether I am going to subject them to conversations about intrepid afternoons full of tea and scones or not. This might mean that they unable to place my accent and that I don’t sound like a pale imitation of good auld Queen Lizzie anymore. I like to think it is because I now sound like I may have a more interesting tale to tell than I did for years before.