How Our Accents Help Us Find Kinfolk
Our voices carry a connection to home
I was minding my own business in a queue for a pear donut, not just any queue mind you. I was standing in line to buy a very expensive pear donut in Paris, France. I knew enough French to get by, and I was used to hearing the French language and accent. Amongst the typical, and for me, rather wonderful sounds of Parisian talk my ears pricked up. Surely not I thought, I must have been mistaken! I looked around, searching, and then I heard it again, a Suffolk accent! Right then and there I transported right back home, by a familiar voice of a stranger.
I purchased my pear donut, which was indeed very expensive but admittedly divine, and I went in search of the voice that spoke like me. I don’t usually walk up to strangers smiling, whilst clinging onto my donut like it was a Fabergé egg, but this was an exception. I walked up to the owner of the voice who was chatting away to a fellow Englishman. I smiled politely and asked the question that I already knew the answer to.
“Excuse me, are you from Suffolk?”
He heard my own accent and beamed a smile back at me.
“Tew roight oi am”.
In that instant we were reunited kinfolk, and as it turns out he came from the next town over from me. What were the chances?
Why was hearing an accent from my home county so comforting?
So what’s the point of that little walk down memory lane? It’s the simplicity of hearing a familiar voice, and sometimes that voice doesn’t even need to be one that is you known to you. It can something that reminds you of where you are from, rather than where you are at the time. Much like when you hear a song that takes you back to a moment or memory. Or the scent of something that instantly transports you to another period in your life. Our voices and accents have that same quality, and provide us with magical moments of recognition.
Why are our accents so evocative?
Why do they connect us?
Why do they feel so much a part of our identity and heritage?
It is all about belonging
It goes back to something as old as time, belonging. Belonging to a group of people, a tribe. Not just any tribe, but YOUR tribe. Our voices are often part of our family life. They are part of our heritage, our history and most importantly our ancestry. Even when science might not be able to explain it fully, our DNA and senses feel when something feels like home. That something can easily be a voice that shares a connection your own.
Quite often in society we hear voices that do not carry an accent, or a vocabulary that contains old regional dialect. Which makes hearing a voice from your own region, especially when away from home so welcome. Hearing someone that sounds like a lost loved one brings an emotional response, in the much the same way. Being out in your local area even, in a place where the accent might be declining also makes hearing your own regional accent a thing of joy.
When it all comes down to it, we are not much different to our ancestors from the long ago past. We are familiar with our own family’s voice, along with that of our friends, neighbours and work colleagues. Some of us are fortunate enough to hear others like themselves on a daily basis. In some places the accent has become so rare, that to hear one in the wild is an unexpected treat.
It is ingrained in us to recognise our own tribe. Even if that is in a primitive, long ago recognition sort of way. One that induces feelings of safety, home, family, cultural roots. Or a modern alternative, standing in a queue waiting to buy a French pear donut kind of way.
Holding onto that regional voice
If you have a regional accent, and the added joy of using a regional dialect, treasure it. Use your regional voice, be proud of your areas individuality. Keep that old way of speaking alive, before it disappears for good. Once these these are lost, they are gone forever.
And you never know, you might one day be the person to make someone else’s day by using one of the simplest ways of communicating, speaking.
Sarah Ann Shave