Accent, it turns out, is a bit of a battleground. While Ireland has an astonishing number of regional accents relative to its small size, few are internationally recognised.
Send an American or a Brit deep into Kerry or west Cork, and they might be shocked to discover that the language locals are speaking is the one they’re using themselves.
Despite record numbers of Irish people once again leaving home for Australia, here in the Australian capital, a native Irish accent isn’t all that common.
You’ll see and hear evidence of Irish immigrants within minutes of arriving in central Sydney or Melbourne and taking a stroll around. Here in Canberra, I hear Irish people infrequently but when I do, it’s often construction workers whose voices carry home with them. A greeting or a joke floats through the air from one person to another, and my body stops whatever it’s doing to listen, as though I’ve heard a rare bird in the wild.
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Irish construction workers have travelled halfway over the globe to find job security and a place to live here. They work on the bafflingly numerous apartment complexes being constructed in Canberra, as well as the expansion of the city’s version of the Luas.
But there is a greater pull factor than jobs alone. In Australia, “tradies” are respected. At home, their skilled work is still dismissed as lower somehow than donning a polyester shirt to prawn one’s spine over and sit nose-to-desk in an office chair.
Accents don’t always travel along with the people who own them. We all have that friend who gets a job in New York and phones us the following week with an infuriating American accent.
Others will absorb and reproduce the intonation of the place and people they happen to be around in the moment, shedding one accent and shuffling into a glossy new one like snakeskin. Irish people have a long-standing aversion to those among us who do this (Bono and Pierce Brosnan are historic examples).
We dismiss people who suddenly get the “twang” of home or another country on a visit as “notions” or engaged in some form of sycophantism. The sort of people who make us cringe with their raw yearning to be liked. To belong. It may merely be that their accent doesn’t represent some fixed self, but a means of communion with others. They speak how they need to speak.
Others, like me, stay tethered to some place or point in the past, and their accent seems resistant to any change of circumstance. I’m not sure that this is more respectable than someone who sounds Hungarian or Bostonian or whatever else overnight. There might be something intransigent and closed about an accent that never budges.
When I was growing up in Limerick, my mother winkled every colloquial intonation from my accent. As a tiny child, if I pointed at the majestic white birds scudding like barks along the Shannon river and declared “swang!”, she’d look aghast and calmly say “swonnnnn” in a plummy English accent.
In our house, accents were a catfish. My mother was born in London to a driving instructor father and a mother who left school at 14, both Irish. Her voice, which gestured somehow at a wealthy family and a cultured life that didn’t exist, was an accident that never really left her even after more than 40 years in Limerick. The family moved back to Limerick in the late 1970s when my mother was just 13 and bullied at school for being an outsider. Sasanach.
My mother continued this tradition of false-flag accents with me, believing that even the child of a single mother in the Limerick of the 1990s could grow up to go to Trinity College or write for The Irish Times if I just sounded like one of “them”. She was right, to an extent. It helped.
The problem since – if it is a problem – has been that my accent now seems fixed. Six years in the UK didn’t touch it, and now two in Australia have also failed to make their mark. No interrogative upspeak has crept in at the end of sentences. No local phrasing has replaced what predated it.
The accent my mother built – chiselled in as though she saw potential in a block of marble – was created from love. A woman whose life was made harder through signalling the “wrong” identity was trying to gift me a sort of social camouflage. She meant it as armour.
Inadvertently, she just made me another kid – like herself all those years before – whose voice didn’t fit her context. But then, where I come from isn’t where she wanted me to fit. Perhaps she wanted me to fit where she came from.
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The result has been an Irish RP [received pronunciation] that emerges nonsensically from a place where the accent has its own music. Where a swan is a swang, and where you can call someone over by saying “C’mere and I’ll tell you a question”. It is the accent of a person who now lives in Australia, confusing baristas who can’t understand her coffee order.
Here, the vocal neutrality that my mother taught me isn’t neutral at all – it’s just another foreign accent from a country far away, and it frequently has people asking me to repeat myself. ‘What was that?’ they say. ‘Can I have the beeefff burrrgerrr,’ I say back, slowly and deliberately, not as though I think there’s something wrong with the person writing down my lunch order, but as though I’m realising something might be off about me.
The way we speak signals much about us, mapping where we‘ve been, what we are running from and what we value.
Somewhere too in our accent, which tells the stories of people who came before us, and the choices they made, is the ghost of other times and places. Other people. When I’m walking around Canberra, or Sydney, and I hear an Irish accent, it lands in my ear like some primal recognition. Like a story I’ve heard before.
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