I am a reasonably Scottish person. I have lived there for approximately 80% of my life, and I speak with a fairly broad Central Belt accent.
It therefore boggles my mind how often my nationality is mistaken. This usually happens with either Americans or people from the London area. Typically, I am mistaken for being Irish or Northern Irish. Not necessarily a bad thing, and probably fuelled by the fact that Boyfriend is from Belfast; people probably like to assume that since we are both Obviously Not English we must be from the same place.
This blog post is being written because for the first time in my life someone failed to recognise the Obviously Not English part and his wild guesses at my homeplace amused me terribly.
The offender was a young lad from Surrey, approximately 20 years old, has been living in the North East of England for several months now. He asked whereabouts I was from; I assumed he knew the country and prompted him to guess.
His first was Somerset. Second guess was Yorkshire.
Oh dear. How can people be so unaware of their country that they know so little about places outside a few miles radius of their home? Le sigh.
Accents are hard to decipher! Why would Scottish be any different from any other county/country? The only Obvious I have is “Obviously not sounding like me” I refrain from guessing simply because I find it so difficult to tell Glaswegian from Geordie from Gloucester and get it wrong probably 2 out of 3 times! Yes, it’s kind of embarrassing but it’s no more so due to the border of nations rather than regions.
Hah! That’s bonkers. Some accents are hard to pin, yours isn’t one of those. Your accent isn’t exactly the strongest, but it’s very clearly Scottish. I could maybe believe someone thinking it Irish, but Somerset? Or Yorkshire? Thinking either one of those is similar? LOLZ.
I’m secretly jealous of people’s regional accents. I’ve never had one, despite living in the same area all my life. At uni, whenever I would tell people where I came from there’d be a pause and a “… yeah…I thought I could hear that in your accent.”
No. They couldn’t.
Accents are full of giveaway words – without those I’m awful. ‘Here’ for Welsh people, ‘right’ or ‘potatoes’ for Ireland (or any number with a three in), and of course, for Somerset: ‘cider’.
Kiddingish. Potatoes is not one, and I’m not as bad as that at identifying accents. Nevertheless, unless there is a distance of at least 200-odd miles between places I find it quite tough to differentiate accents from the same country.
Scotland/Somerset, though…that’s pretty embarrassing.