where did my accent go?

a formal investigation into finding a lost accent and the paradox of trying to blend in, in order to stand out.

Coney Beach, Porthcawl, South Wales. Photo by @jonnysnapps.

When I first moved out of South Wales in 2015, I squeezed myself, along with all my belongings, into my little white Peugeot 107 (Phoebe) and cried all the way to the Severn Bridge. For 45 minutes, my windscreen wipers wiped the rain off my window, and my sleeve wiped the tears (and snot) from my face. My head was off to London. But my heart remained in Wales.

Long gone in my rear view mirror was the life I’d spent 21 years building and finding and loving in Wales. Family. Friends. School life. My first job. My first boyfriend. My university life. My second boyfriend. My beloved family dogs. The mountains. The sea. Pretty much everything I’d ever known had been forged in Wales – and here I was, leaving it all behind.

As I drove towards London, I took my Welsh accent with me. I think it just about squeezed into the car. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, my accent had never been a particularly strong one. In comparison to the amazing Valleys accent that my dad’s side of the family has, it could even be described as weak, even. But it was definitely a generic South Wales one. It was a little bit singsong-y, it had the tendency to go from a low to a high pitch out of nowhere and it featured elongated vowel sounds, which frequently transformed the famously monosyllabic word ‘no’ into the two (sometimes three) syllable word, ‘no-wuhh!!!’

But my accent had always been prone to wandering, too. If we were on holidays and we met other kids from Manchester, I’d come back with a twang. And despite moving even further west into Wales when I went to Swansea University, my accent wandered in and amongst the various English and American friendships I made, and the English boyfriend I acquired there, too.

A wandering accent is one part of what is known as the ‘chameleon effect’. This is a subconscious survival instinct, which describes people's tendency to mimic or mirror another person's facial expressions, nonverbal behaviours and verbal expressions. According to Psychology Today, it’s ‘considered a type of social glue that keeps us connected to others, as it makes us feel that others are more like us than not’. So the more we’re trying to relate to someone, the more we subconsciously mimic their ways.

And I have always been a pretty good mimic. As I child, I was frequently doing impressions of characters from film and TV, to the point where my parents encouraged me to take drama lessons, which resulted in me getting through to the final round of auditions to be a ‘Dumping Ground Kid’ on the TV show, The Story of Tracy Beaker. If you speak to me in a regional accent, I’ll probably be able to do a pretty good version of it back to you. (I’m currently trying to perfect my impression of Parker Posey in The White Lotus S3).

But I’m pretty sure my accent came with me to London, and even stayed with me in my first house share for a while, too.

Many of us move to London because we feel it’s where we need to go to make something of ourselves. It is a city of people finding our paths. Opening our minds. Figuring out who we are, outside of everything we’ve ever known. Trying to stand out, while simultaneously blending in.

To move to London is a very big and daunting move for anyone. But especially when you’re from a small town – and a small country. I mean to start with, there are 8.8 million people in London, compared to 3.1 million in the whole of Wales. So before anything else, it’s a bit busier, like.

And when you exchange the green, green grass of home for the grey, grey rush of London, it’s hard to figure out where you might fit in. As many who have created a new life in a new city know, finding your people takes time – especially when you’ve landed there alone.

My family and closest friends were still in Wales. My still-from-university, then-boyfriend was living away in Hull on his graduate scheme. I had a handful of uni friends who had also moved to London, but they were all scattered about the city. And although my cousin eventually moved up too, she was living on the opposite end of the Northern Line to me.

Everywhere I looked, people seemed to be busy tending to the patch of London they’d already grown and nurtured for themselves. Even my new housemates in the house share I’d moved into seemed too busy to ever be in the shared living room. For a long time, I felt lost and far too aware that I had swapped my comfort zone for Zone 3. And in that zone, there were no other Welsh accents to be found.

Like many of us do, I looked to my first job to find my people. And really, there was no better place to be than at an early-stage startup that sold personalised dog food on the internet. The company had just had funding, and there were only about 50 people who worked there – all super interesting, super smart people in their 20s and 30s who’d joined this fast-paced environment to make an impact.

Throw in a pretty special company culture created by the co-founders, no remote-work and weekly Friday Beers on the company card, and it’s no wonder that many of the friends I made from that special time of our lives are still some of my closest friends today. One of them even became my husband.

Here, I was surrounded by brilliant people who’d been to Oxford, Cambridge and other top UK universities. People who, unlike me, had gone to university with intention, determination and a really good set of A Level results. Some people were like, award-winning data scientists who’d done PHDs, too. There was no doubt that I was completely out of my depth.

At one of the Friday Beers sessions, a guy from the marketing team asked me which school I’d gone to. I’d excitedly replied with, ‘Archbishop McGrath School in Bridgend! Why, do you know it?!’, not understanding that what he was actually asking was whether I’d been to one of the well-known private schools in England. He had not heard of my school.

Nevertheless, despite this obvious sticking out as a sore, practically dragon-tattooed thumb, I was very happy in this world. My job as Social Media Editor was to write and create engaging content for the brand. And I found that it came quite naturally to me. According to nearly every monthly performance audit I did, the most engaging content was simply: footage on Instagram Stories of the office dogs running around. So a lot of my time was spent crouched down on the floor, talking to dogs and trying to create a good story out of whatever they were doing.

Jokes that I felt I was in on started to be made. My job was the best job in the company (it was). My job was not a real job. My job was easy. My job was silly.

Whether this was true or not didn’t matter to me. As the youngest person in the company, the only person with a Welsh accent and this being my first ‘career’ job, I already felt like an imposter anyway. It didn’t matter that I was holding down the silliest job in the company – I was just so grateful to be in this brilliant, exciting new world. Writing articles, sending funny tweets and giving personalities to each of the office dogs was a pretty great way to spend 40 hours a week.

And the job suited my personality, too. I was chatty, silly and inquisitive. I took my unserious job seriously, and began getting asked to take on more writing tasks. I asked questions without thinking whether I might sound stupid for not already knowing the answer – and I asked them in my Welsh accent. Everyone seemed so unapologetically themselves, and there didn’t really seem to be a reason as to why I shouldn’t be too.

Next year, it’ll be 10 years since I moved to London. In that time, I have found myself in rooms and have taken opportunities that the girl who squeezed herself, and all her belongings, into that little white Peugeot 107 would never have dared to imagine for herself.

After nearly two years, I left that brilliant startup to become European Copywriter at a tech company. Then I moved onto an advertising agency, then another startup, then two more startups and then another tech company. But of all the jobs in all the teams in all the companies, I am still yet to see another Welsh person walk into mine.

As I met more people and expanded my circles outside of work, I began to feel a lot more self-conscious. I was a copywriter now, so my job wasn’t the thing that was a bit of a novelty – but instead, my accent was becoming one.

I would meet new people and they would detect a not-from-around-here accent, and they would ask where I was from. I would say ‘Wales’, and they would roll out their best attempt at a Welsh accent (which somehow always sounds more like an Indian accent) and ask, ‘Oooh, you’re from Way-uls are yew?’ Yes. I just told you that.

Upon learning I was Welsh, people would tell me that they’d never been to Wales before, but that they loved Gavin & Stacey (understandably). Men would tell me that their mother loved Tom Jones, and that they used to really fancy Charlotte Church. Was I a good singer too, they’d ask? Could I pronounce that really long train station name? Could I do it for them now? And then finally and inevitably, did I shag sheep?

I would smile and laugh and make sure that the chip on my shoulder was never exposed. But it began to feel like I’d exposed myself. It was almost as if the very revelation that I was Welsh was an admission that I was not supposed to be there. I’d been caught out as an imposter, disguising myself to take the place of the person who was actually meant to be there. And now my game was up. Shit.

Somewhere between getting bored of the same jokes and leaving conversations feeling like I now had to prove myself as deserving of the position I’d already earned, my accent slipped away. It became only really detectable by a little lilt, that got stronger if I was excited, angry or drunk. And when you work in advertising, you are quite often drunk.

At an agency party, I’d had a few wines and a creative director interrupted me mid-sentence to point at me and say, ‘God you sounded REALLY Welsh, then’. It wasn’t a compliment. Again, I felt embarrassed, but this time it wasn’t about sounding Welsh – it was about why I usually didn’t.

When you have an accent that’s not like everyone else’s in the rooms you’re in, you do draw attention to yourself. And it’s not always for the right reasons. At work, I don’t want to stand out for being the only Welsh person in the room. I want to stand out for being good at what I do. For being good at what I do, as well as being Welsh, instead of for being good at what I do, in spite of being Welsh. But the latter is often how it feels.

It feels like this when people repeat words you’ve just said to get a laugh. It feels like this when people tell you that the road signs are hilarious, and our words are so silly. When you’re asked if you grew up with electricity. When you’re asked if there’s internet in Wales yet. When you’re asked if you lived down a mine.

It also feels like this when your cousin’s boss tells her that he has to turn the transcription setting on for all their meetings, so that he can understand what she’s saying. And when your husband’s brother says that Welsh universities ‘don’t count’. And when your husband’s mother repeatedly refers to your family as the ‘Welsh mafia’, and tells your husband that he shouldn’t be with you because you’re just after their English money.

So when people tell me, ‘Oh, you don’t sound that Welsh,’ it makes my little Welsh heart hurt. I smile and say, ‘Aw, I know. But I’ve lived away from home for nearly 10 years now.’

But what I really want to say is, ‘I know. Isn’t it sad? It’s it so sad that the language of access and opportunity isn’t usually spoken with a Welsh accent? Isn’t it so sad that it’s basically been drilled into me that the more Welsh I do sound, the less seriously you’ll take me? So now that I seem to have lost my accent, maybe you could tell me where I could find it again?’

Over the last year, I’ve noticed that my accent seems to have found its way back to me again. It still ebbs and flows depending on who I’m with. When I’m with my family, I hear it getting stronger after a few days. When I’m at work or with English friends, I hear it getting flatter, with clearer pronunciation. That’s just the way it flows.

But what’s different now is that I hear it more consistently sounding unmistakably Welsh. You could argue that this is because I’ve spent a great deal more time in Wales over the last year, what with getting married there and working remotely from there a lot more to spend time with family. You could also argue that it’s because my cousin and I now live 10 minutes away from each other in London, so we’re exposed to another Welsh accent a lot more.

But I think it’s more than that. The last two years have been a game changer for me. After being made redundant and things coming to a head between my husband and his parents in 2023, I took a maternity contract role that allowed us to step away from our lives and move to Amsterdam. It was the first time I’d taken a job because of the life that job could give me, rather than taking a job that could become my life.

There, away from our everyday lives, in a small walkable city full of expats with countless different backgrounds and accents, we found ourselves again. On a call with my then-boss, Sadira, I made a throwaway comment about being ‘too much’ in relation to how excited I was about a project. She stopped me mid-sentence, and said, ‘Too much? If anything, I want more of you.’ I had never heard anything like that at work in my life. I burst into tears.

Together with my husband, I picked up the pieces of my shattered confidence, and unravelled a significant amount of tangled opinions about myself that had never belonged to me in the first place. I stopped doing the things I thought I should be doing. I started doing the things I wanted to be doing. And over time, I heard my accent start to come back.

A few months later, I was organising a Copywriters Unite event at the bar across the road from our flat. One evening, my husband and I were cycling down the street adjacent to ours, and I noticed a design agency. I got off my bike, and knocked on the door. ‘Hiya!’, I said. ‘Sorry to just knock out of the blue, but I’m organising an event next week for writers and creatives to meet up and just chat about all things words. It’s just around the corner, so thought I’d pop in and see if you fancied it?’

The three men in the room just looked at me, until one of them said, ‘Oh, are you Welsh?’ And I said, ‘Uh, yeah! Are you?’ About a minute later, I’d established that two of the three men were Welsh, and one of their mothers lived about 20 minutes away from mine. A week later, we were watching Wales beat Georgia in the Rugby World Cup at a sports bar across the city. I was so glad my accent had be there, ready and waiting to be noticed again.

We’re back in London now, and though I spend most of my days with my English husband, our English friends and my English co-workers, my Welsh accent is still with me.

This English husband of mine is the first man I’ve ever loved who has made me feel completely at home in who I am. Not once has he made me feel like I’m not enough. Not once has he made me feel like I’m too much, either. And he fiercely defends me from those who do.

For too long of a time, I let my insecurities about needing to blend in and needing to prove myself take my accent away from me. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that since I’ve stopped carrying the weight of the opinions from people who make me feel small, I’ve found more success and happiness in my career, too.

It’s a weird thing, an accent. I never thought it would mean so much to me. But our accents are quite literally the voice of our identities and our heritage – and I couldn’t be any more proud of mine. The person I am today is stitched together by everything I’ve ever known and done, and my accent and I have done a lot of wandering in that time. But not all accents that wander are lost. And I don’t plan on losing mine again.

Getting ready to see Wales vs Ireland in the 2024 Six Nations. Wales went on to lose 31-7.