None of us think we have an accent.
Everyone else has one. The people on the telly, the bloke in the queue who's clearly not from round here, your cousins from the other end of the country. But you? You just talk normally.
Then you hear yourself on a voice note, or a friend does an impression of you, and there it is. You've had it all along. You just couldn't hear it.
I've got a strong Welsh accent. My mum and dad's accents were pure Stoke-on-Trent. And whenever they went back to Stoke for a visit, they'd come home sounding even more like Stoke than when they left. A few days back among the old voices and it all came flooding back.
I've thought about that a lot over the years. Because there's another voice we all pick up without noticing, and it behaves in exactly the same way. The one inside our heads.
Picked up before you knew you were listening
Nobody sits a child down and teaches them an accent. You don't learn it in a lesson. You pick it up from the voices around you, long before you know you're learning anything. I don't remember learning to walk either, but my body never forgets how.
I know how much a child soaks up. I was born in England and lived there until I was six. Then we moved to Wales, and I grew up surrounded by Welsh voices. Without anyone teaching me, I started to sound like them. My mum and dad heard those same voices and kept their Stoke accents for life. Mine changed because I was still learning how to sound.
Our inner voice arrives the same way. The one that comments on everything you do and tells you who you are. Nobody hands it to you. You just absorb what's in the air. Whether it's safe to need anything. Whether you have to earn your place. Whether your feelings are welcome or a bit of a nuisance. Whether you're enough as you are.
By the time you're old enough to question any of it, it doesn't feel like a belief anymore. It feels like how things are. It's simply the way you sound.
For me, the strongest one was that I wasn't enough. I don't remember being taught it. It was just there, the same way my vowels were.
When the old voice comes back
Most of the time you can tidy an accent up a bit. We all have a phone voice. You know the one. Slightly posher, slightly slower, the one that comes out when you ring the bank or answer a number you don't recognise.
But get tired, or upset, or a few drinks in, and the phone voice goes. The real accent comes back stronger than ever.
The inner voice behaves the same way. On a good day you can manage it. You can be calm and reasonable and talk yourself round. Then you're exhausted, or someone says something that catches you in the wrong place, and suddenly you're reacting the way you did at twelve. The old voice is back in charge.
Managing it takes energy. When we're tired or hurting, that energy runs out, and we fall back on what we learned first. The oldest voice is the one that's been running longest, so it's the one we return to.
And then there's going home. You can be a grown adult who runs a team and pays a mortgage, then you walk into your parents' house at Christmas and within an hour you've slipped back into the old place. The peacemaker. The one who keeps everyone happy. The one who waits to be told what to do. Nobody asks you to, and you don't decide to. Old places and old people have a way of bringing out the old voice, just like Stoke did for my mum and dad.
If that happens to you, you haven't gone backwards. Where you've been keeps deciding where you end up, whether you can hear it or not.
Can it change when we're older?
As adults we don't soak things up the way a six year old does. But an accent can still change. For decades the BBC expected its announcers to speak in Received Pronunciation, what people called BBC English. Plenty of them didn't grow up talking that way. They learned it, with practice and effort.
The inner voice can change when you're older too. A child takes on whatever is in the air. An adult has to notice what they picked up, and then do the work of changing it. It takes time, and there will be days the old voice slips back in. But it can be done.
Some of what you picked up you'll want to keep. Someone once told me my voice was soothing. I'd never thought of it like that. It was just how I talked. But it's mine, and I wouldn't swap it.
So what does it look like to work with this?
Reflect. Start by listening to the voice in your head. Notice when it gets louder. When you're tired, when you're with certain people, when you go back to certain places. Then ask whose voice it really is. Where did you first learn that you had to keep everyone happy, or that you'd better not need too much? Was it ever yours?
Release. Let the parts that hurt you soften. They ease with time and with the people around you now. People who see you clearly. Experiences that tell you something different from what you learned at the start. Each time you notice the old voice and choose not to follow it, it loses a bit of its hold.
Reclaim. Keep what's good. The warmth, the humour, the way you care for people, the things you picked up that make you who you are. Then start choosing who you listen to now, including yourself, so the chapters ahead are shaped on purpose.
Most of us go through life never hearing our own accent. We think we just talk normally. But if you listen closely you'll hear it.
We've all picked something up before we knew we were listening.
So what did you pick up? And is it still speaking for you?
If you'd like to start exploring your inner voice, and reflecting on your story so far, you can find out more here.
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