Another snippet

After the summer break it's time to get back to work on the book. Here is a small section about moving away from Warrington:

Think for a moment about your own dialect, whatever it is. It is full of words, sayings, expressions, turns of phrase, and proverbs that are peculiar to your geographic region, and quite possibly your town or village. It sounds like you. It represents the sounds of your earliest memories, the sounds of your childhood friends, the sounds of your games and play. It may not be obvious at first, but if you leave for a while and then return, you will notice how the dialect sounds like you and you like it. The longer you stay away, the more you may lose your dialect but it never disappears. It is possibly as fundamental to our understanding of ourselves as our relationship with our parents.

Our dialect is our first language. Long before we learn "official" rules of grammar and standardised spelling, we are fluent in our own native dialect with its own grammar, spelling, and pronunciation. The education system quite rightly teaches us the standard language of our nation, but it should not, it must not, do it at the expense of our native dialect. However, if and when a person leaves the place where they were born, they will have to alter their dialect at least a little.

When I left Warrington to go to university in London, I did not realise that I had an accent or spoke a dialect; my fellow students soon let me know, albeit light-heartedly, that I was from "Up North". We often made fun of each other’s accents and dialects, but what I didn’t realise was that this joviality had set in motion a process that would result in a distinct "softening" of my accent.

In my day-to-day life in London, the Warrington dialect was useless because no-one understood it, and my accent just made me stand out. I didn’t consciously set out to change my way of speaking, it just happened. When I left England to move to Finland, the way I spoke would change even more. The English I heard was not a regional variant, rather an English that had been learned in school by reading books and at home by watching television programmes. It was an English that was not the native language of the people speaking it, and it had rules all of its own, but those rules did not apply to me.

I had to "standardise" my English. I had to focus on pronouncing properly and clearly so that people could understand me. I had to explain what I meant rather than simply reeling off set phrases that had, in their native setting, slowly gathered precise meanings over hundreds of years. And as my Finnish improved, I spoke less and less English altogether. The English that I spoke had "fossilized", and I was in danger of losing the dialect.

I didn't have the opportunity to visit Warrington for almost six years, but when I did finally return, the sounds of the voices disturbed something that had been hibernating inside me all that time. I recognised these sounds, these voices, these phrases. I found that I could express myself with absolute ease, saying exactly what I intended to say rather than a close approximation. For the first time in a long time I sounded like myself and the people around me. I was home!