The first time my accent got me mistaken for an American was during a routine check-up at my doctor's in New York. "You're Irish? Really? I thought you were from Maine or something," was the reply to my assertion that I grew up between Wicklow and rural Wexford.
This encounter was the culmination of my year-long attempt to water down my use of Irish slang and humour around my American classmates. I hadn’t expected it to be so successful.
It was only in the weeks after my doctor’s remark that I began to pay more attention to the underlying reasons for hiding my accent, as well as to the way I felt when I heard myself slip up and sound Irish in my use of slang or grammar.
I was surprised to discover that I had developed a finely attuned ear to my Irish-American accent, and on those occasions when I could hear my Irishness I would feel almost embarrassed, as though I were putting on an accent. I had spent so long weeding out the expletives and the slang that I didn’t notice I was losing one of the most easily identifiable aspects of my Irish identity.
Americanised speech
When I returned to Ireland I found that, although I had successfully Americanised my speech in New York, I could not as easily regain my natural Irish accent at home. I've lost count of the number of times my family has teased me for using American phrases.
I knew I would return to the US to continue my studies, so I didn’t feel too anxious about my accent not returning to its original patterns. It is only now that I have spent another couple of years in the US (and face at least another four in studying for my PhD) that I have once again grown self-conscious about my lack of identifiable Irishness.
I feel a certain pressing anxiety about needing to be easily identifiable as Irish. It’s partly nationalistic pride and partly homesickness. As many other emigrants can probably empathise with, I feel an overwhelming need to retain a strong and tangible connection with home. And what is stronger than our use of slang and grammar?
The longer I spend here the more I find myself trying to sound and appear more Irish. I’ve fallen into a strange rabbit hole where I feel as though I’m performing my natural Irish accent and identity in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the home life.
Hyphenated identity
I haven’t yet examined too closely my reasons for needing this easy identification, other than to recognise that I have not yet fully come to terms with developing a hyphenated identity.
It is not just my accent I am consciously performing but also my sense of Irishness itself. I often wonder if other Irish emigrants around the world feel the same sense of anxiety and pressure on St Patrick’s Day, for example. As though there’s something implicitly “Irish” you’re supposed to exude. As though you need to make sure everyone knows you’re the real deal. You want to be recognisably Irish because, if you start to lose that, you start to lose your sense of belonging to Irish society – and your sense of Ireland as home.
At times I feel I have no business commenting on political and social issues in Ireland, because I made the choice to leave. And yet, like many other international students in my position, I have no real political standing in my adopted country. I find myself in an uncomfortable limbo whereby I don’t fully belong in either place, yet I want to be able to belong to two places at once.
I’m not nostalgic. I don’t believe in a romanticised version of Ireland. There’s a reason I left. I think it has more to do with my growing understanding that my identification of home is far more fluid than I ever considered before. It’s the growing realisation that my identity has become hyphenated and that my Irishness is no longer predominant.
Yes, I have begun the uneasy transition to Irish-American.
