People kept asking me before I left, if I would develop a Scottish or Orcadian accent whilst here. I cited my sister’s experience – she lived several years in England in her teens and while she didn’t take on an English accent per se, there was a slight but noticeable difference to the rhythm of her speech. She has since returned, and now speaks perfect Canadian.
There are certain words that I have had to start using differently – here ‘pants’ means undies so I am quite careful there (don’t want to be asking someone to admire my news pants when I meant to say trousers – things could get frisky fast). I now stop for ‘petrol’ at a ‘service station’ on the ‘motorway’. I try to remember to say ‘pavement’ for sidewalk and at my cookery club I do reference ‘aubergines’ and ‘courgettes’. As an aside – I think a lot more North Americans would eat eggplants if we called them aubergines. Who wants to eat something called an ‘egg-plant’? But I digress.
And I do hear myself using certain words a lot more often – these are mainly words or phrases I heard around the house growing up. ‘I dinna ken’ means I don’t know; I say ‘wee’ a lot for small; and we’ve always referred to ground beef as ‘mince’, so I fit right in here. Oh yes, and ‘tatties’ and ‘neeps’ are also a normal part of my vocabulary.
There are words I likely won’t change: although ‘kirk’ is used frequently here, most people say church, so I still do too. I talk about going to the grocery store instead of the ‘supermarket’ and my friends know perfectly well what I mean.
But I have no intention of changing my pronunciation of words we have in common. I still say lab’rah-tory or cel-ah-brah-tory, instead of ‘lab-OR-atory’, or ‘cel-a-BRAY-tory’. My parents had moved permanently to Canada, so over time gave up ‘privv-acy’ for the North American privacy and ‘vitt-ah-min’ for our vitamin. But I am not staying forever, and fully intend to continue with my Canadian-speak. And I would point out, I occasionally hear Brits from different regions asking each other to repeat or clarify something, and yet, no one has ever once struggled to understand my nice, clean, clear Canadian accent. Just sayin’.
And then I said it. I heard myself, yesterday in Wm Shearer’s, asking one of the staff where the ‘tinned to-mah-toes’ were. Oh dear. Resistance is futile.