My Accent

Being the only person from your hometown in a new city is a conflicting experience. The loss of everyday comforts, random bursts of homesickness and consistent feeling of guilt locks horns with a feeling of liberation.

I come from a city called Liverpool in the United Kingdom, it’s known for being home to the biggest pop act of all time, two premier league teams and some of the nicest, most genuine people you will ever meet.

I’ve lost count of how many times people have said they wish they were from where i’m from. it’s something i appreciate more than words can say, but i also think, in the spirit of coming to terms with myself as a person, it’s important to try and explain why sometimes this feels like a burden.

I moved to Amsterdam in March 2024 after a year in Germany and it was, by far, the best decision i ever made, but it was also the most difficult. It is an absolute privilege to re-paint your life on a blank canvas, this is never lost on me, but despite feeling like dressing up in an outfit of newfound liberation, there was one facet of my life that i could never just wash clean and wear fresh the next day; what i like to call the most sincerest form of ones self - the accent.

Yes I’m sure you’ve heard countless times online where sadio mané was called the “best player in the world” (spoiler alert, he actually was) or wondered how it could be so funny to say the phrase “chicken and a can of coke”. Those funny, short snippets on instagram are more than just for your viewing pleasure, they’re something I and many others live with our whole life.

I feel the scouse accent can almost serve as a party trick sometimes, it’s always welcomed after a few drinks; just a few standard buzzwords and a brief explanation of your upbringing and you’re a smoking area’s wet dream. No doubt that I’ve got a number of free beers along the way as a result of it.

However the sobering part of this dialect is having to live every day with it in a city that is not so accustomed to it. every work meeting, club night, first date, coffee with friends and birthday party is met with puzzled looks and, more often than not, requests to “speak normally”.

This alone can prove an obstacle to any unsuspecting scouse ex-pat, however on a much more personal and perhaps previously unshared note, despite coming across to friends as very sociable I can actually be very anxious, and sometimes suffer from depressive episodes. During my time in Liverpool it would not be uncommon for me to come home from a night out questioning whether friends for years liked me or not on little to no basis, or just feel like a burden, and now going out feeling like a burden with a thick accentwithout the shield of lifelong relationships feels like adding vodka to a frying pan. i would be lying if i said some cycles home were not without tearshed. Sometimes it felt easier on nights out to just not talk as to not cause issues and avoid disjointed conversation.

I know nearly all people outside the UK don’t mean this with one iota of malice, if i was them i would also be taken aback, laugh and say “what on earth is THAT?!”. Like you have to admit it is very out there. It sounds like someone’s put a dublin accent through a sand grinder.

now the question on a lot of people’s minds at the moment is probably:

“why don’t you just tone it down?”

believe me i’ve tried.

It’s actually quite annoying because I’ve got to a stage where my accent is a little bit weaker than before I left the UK but still nowhere near enough to avoid the question marks across non-native (and a lot of the time American) faces but also enough that i get jibes from scousers when I go home. I’m in what i like to call dialect purgatory. This I can for sure see the funny side of but weakening the accent further is just not a possibility, i’d like to come up with a funny anecdote to explain why but sometimes it’s better to just be served the truth.

and unfortunately the truth is a lot sadder than our warm, dulcet tones imply.

like many cities up north, we have a comparatively more working class demographic compared to those south of Birmingham, however Liverpool’s complicated history through thatchers managed decline, the Hillsborough disaster (in which 97 lives were lost at the fault of the british police with blame laying unjustly in scouse hands for 27 years) and two centuries of irish immigration  (with a huge proportion coming to escape the UK’s genocide in Ireland during 1840s) has produced, like many marginalised communities, a sense of community, pride, belonging and identity.

When Diogo Jota died last year, it was put perfectly by Bill Bygroves that this city “knows how to grieve”. I remember vividly hearing him say it during the memorial programme, it was something that hit home and sat with me for some time. It hurt hearing someone put it like that. But it hurt so much because of how right he was. This city is accustomed to tragedy. It’s a true, depressing yet endearing quality that is shared across people in the city, even if said tragedies pre-date those of our generation. It’s a strange, sombre yet necessary torch to pass on.

This means that when people ask me to speak with a softer accent, it really feels like I’m being asked to speak with a more southern accent, which for me and almost all other scousers is just an absolute no-go due to the historical context. I’ve spent a lot of my life having to put up with a host of classist insults, and sometimes find myself in disbelief knowing that my parents generation had it 100 times worse. There’s studies to prove that even in the modern day scousers are less likely to be hired than applicants of the same experience, so giving up that accent, despite living in a place that doesn’t hold those same prejudices, feels like throwing in the proverbial towel.

I have a lot of friends from the south these days and this is not meant as an insult to them, if anything i would say that opinions on scousers have never been better in history and I’m lucky that people close to me don’t hold these views, it just feels very historically on the nose; as if there is some sort of appropriate manner to speak english. There’s a bbc interview of a man in middlesbrough who’s asked to repeat words in his dialect and is *corrected* with the *proper* way. At best it’s condescending, at worst it’s just plain classism.

In my experience having an identity is like olives, you only really get it when you’re older. I sometimes struggled with my scouse identity as I always felt it was an impasse to becoming my own authentic version of myself, something that always felt more difficult in Liverpool with expectations regarding fashion, music, traditional masculinity, etc. As much as I love the scouse identity, a pessimistic take is that it can sometimes feel like we’re putting ourselves in our own imaginary box, like this is all we can and ever will be. However these days rather than locking horns with this self-imposed stalemate I try and view it more as another tile in life’s rich tapestry. It takes a while to get to a viewpoint like that, which is by no means conclusive, but over time my frustration over the complexity of this search for identity has turned into appreciation that it can be such a complex thing. After all, nothing good ever comes easy.

When a city is pushed down in the manner that liverpool has, it creates a certain amount of pride that i appreciate a lot of other cities can’t relate to; a pressure-makes-diamonds scenario, and with the added factor that I no longer walk among my scouse populate on a daily basis, the accent sometimes feels like the last bastion of my roots.

It’s conflicting to write something like this because, despite all the difficulty i’ve laid out i would not change it for the world. I had a complicated exit from Liverpool and sometimes felt like I was leaving somewhere that i never really fit into, but father time often bears the gift of perspective; they say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and i’m happy to say that since I’ve been gone i’ve never loved my city more.

i guess it’s all just another raindrop in the colourful storm we call life.