In which I try, and fail to beat Pygmalion

• By Alison
• 15 May, 2010
• 15 Comments

Before I moved to England, I was able to do a pretty impressive Scottish accent. And a not too shabby Irish one.

But then I stepped off the plane and arrived in Old Blighty and realised that what I thought was pretty amusing – wasn’t. And that also – England is a land of absurdly complex and varied accents, which can’t be generalised under the main headers of “posh toff” or “cockney herbert”.

In the early days, when I still behaved like a tourist, and did silly things like going and getting really drunk at The Church – or worse, getting really drunk at somewhere NOT The Church because The Church was full, and we didn’t get in – I often got into arguements with people who were insulted that I didn’t recognise their accent.

Invariably, these people were – almost without fail – Welsh.

And really, I do a great Welsh accent. Although that could also be attributed to the fact that every single accent I try and do these days ends up as a bizarre mutation of Welsh and Pakistani. But – if you were both Welsh AND Pakistani, then my accent would be SPOT ON.

Also, I like to ensure that I insult people outside the united kingdom, it gives my blog a better international flavour.

But one of the accents I can’t do at ALL is the Australian accent.

Which, considering I am Australian must sound very unlikely. But it’s true.

When I grew up, I had no accent. You never do – to your own ears there is no burring or twanging at all. That fun is all for other people.

I arrived in the UK in 1996 with a rather heavy New Zealand accent. This was because I’d lived in Aukland for 18 months prior to travelling here, and the kiwi’s are brutal to Australians. Every time I opened my mouth they’d point and laugh and ridicule me. So I set about aping them, and saying silly things like filum instead of film, and studying Rachel Hunter’s terrible Pantene advert for accent tips.

“Ut wn’t hippen overnert, bert ut woll hippen!”

After a lot of time and effort, I managed to pass for a kiwi, so then I promptly moved to the UK. 

The thing about the UK is that no-one in this country can tell the difference between an Australian, New Zealand and South African accent. Strangely – they can isolate a unique Birmingham strain quicker than sort out the antiopodean differences.

It was only after I’d lived in England for about five years that my accent finally turned into that international British/Australian style accent that Kylie Minogue perfected. I feel that this obviously gives me celebrity connections, although so far nothing has come of that.

But the thing is now that I’ve smudged my accent with three different flavours – I can’t “do” the Aussie accent at all. My efforts sound like a terrible parody which is being done by a very snobby english person who is trying to eat a small hamster at the time.

My children have very British accents, which I can’t do much about unless I start playing Australian tapes to them in their sleep. But when they play – they start talking in yankee doodle talk. This was started by Miss Comic Relief, and I presume that she picked it up from television. Neither of them watch that much tv in the first place, but some of things that they have watched may have been both US and Canadian based. 

I remember listening to her playact with the dollshouse, and was confused to hear her playing with a thick (and extremely accurate) midwest US accent. It started off cute, but these days I spend a lot of time telling them to stop doing it!

The worst accent though – is one of the british ones. I told Miss Trouble Pants off resoundly after she said “Bu^a” to me. Now, I obviously need to explain this one to you. Start by saying “Butter”, and make sure that you make it sound more like “buttah” at the end. Then say it again, and this time take out both T’s when you say it. It comes out like “Bu…uh”. The missing T’s aren’t just missing though – they get replaced by a totally unheard throat contraction. You have to close the throat off between the two vowel sounds.

[update thanks to Michael: This habit of dropping the T sound is called a Glottal stop.]

It’s the worst, most revolting bit of pronunciation that you can imagine. And when she said it to me, I went off my brain. I told her that only lazy, stupid, uneducated people spoke like that, and she wasn’t to do it EVER again.

The next day, when her best friend knocked on the door, and we walked to school together, I was talking to her mother. And it dawned on me, with a cold horrifying clarity – exactly where she’d heard that pronunciation.

I spent the day worried that she’d tell her friend exactly what I’d said, and that I’d have to endure the icy stares of her furious mother. But luck was on my side.

I managed to add an edict to my previous statement later that day and thus prevent a schoolyard mum’s bitchslap. Which is good, because she’d have won!

Meanwhile I think I should concentrate on my Welsh Pakistani accent, as that’s certainly worth passing on to the kids.