People 'doing' your accent

[Topofthemornintoya]

If you live outside Ireland, do people do your accent after you speak?

I live abroad and work with expats from many English speaking countries. From time to time, I will be speaking and the other, non Irish, person will repeat what I said in my accent. Maybe I'll say 'do you know if there's paper in the photocopier?' And someone will imitate me and put on my accent saying 'paper in the photocopier!' like it's hilarious.

I never know how to respond because my first thought is 'oh, you've noticed I speak differently to you and you think its comical. Right' but I never really know how to articulate this. I always feel like our conversation is pretty much over when this happens. I can't explain why.

It never feels like a compliment and I normally respond with blank silence as I don't know how I'm supposed to say. The other person will then note the lead balloon and say 'ooh I just love your accent!'.

I spoke to another expat (but not Irish) friend about this. She hasn't done it to me but said that everyone has an accent and a bit of teasing about accents is ok and nobody means any harm.

I couldn't put my finger on why it annoyed me so much. It used to happen a lot when I lived in Emlngland and it always felt very 'othering' so maybe I am overreacting and it's my issue.

Does it happen to you and do you mind? Am I being very over sensitive? It always makes me feel self conscious. As I said, I've worked with a lot of people from other countries. Scottish, Welsh, English, Kiwis, Australians, Americans, Canadians, Indian people and people from African countries. I would never dream of parroting something back to them in their accent because I found it funny. It's rude, isn't it? What do you think?

That's quite strange @Dontlletmedownbruce . No self awareness there. I think you need to be especially careful with children too.
Are some accents sort of addictive though? When I'm in Scotland I do find myself using Scots phrases rather than bursting into my attempt at the accent - thank heavens!

@MarieDeGournay

That's very interesting.

Can you tell me if this might also come from the way Irish is spoken. My 5 year daughter is growing up in North Country Dublin and puts emphasis on the -ed suffix. For example "I walk-ed", I jump-ed' etc. I have noticed one of her friends also speaks in this way so perhaps she's just copying her.

Possibly. People say 'unearth-ed' here as well. But ....are some usages actually a holdover from older forms of English itself? When I was young ants were called 'pismires' for example. English ppl don't use this word anymore. But it is English.
That said there's loads of Irish syntax used in Hiberno English eg ' I am after doing xyz...' etc. This is called ' re- lexification' according to the retired teacher who gave Irish grinds to my children. I find it all very fascinating.

My FIL still 20 years later mimics my accent all the time. I find it rude and offensive. Going to take some of these come backs as he just should stop.

God he sounds pathetic!

hmmmm This descendant of Northsiders will be thinking very carefully about who she shares her chips with in future.

Just because I live in Down The Country . . .

I always used to get teased in England when I said wing-ed for winged!
Your daughter must be picking up something similar from her little pals.

As Abhannmor said, Hiberno-English has preserved older pronunciations and older words - I think the Brontes call a press a press and not a cupboard, although maybe in their day there was a distinction made between a press for clothing and a cupboard for...well, cups for instance

Shakespeare used 'Stares' to mean starlings, and that was used in parts of rural Ireland until recently.

When you think about it, we became English-speaking instead of Irish-speaking in funny ways, it's not like we were all sat down in a language lab to learn the language systematically😄

English came in after Normal French, and there were places like Kilkenny where French survived as the administrative language, and the settlers spoke English and the 'natives' spoke Irish. English caught on gradually, by osmosis as well as by force. Irish people would have learnt just enough to do their job at the Big House, and then other Irish people would learn from them, i.e. not from native English speakers, but from speakers of English as a 2nd language.
I bet that's how Hiberno-English developed a lot of its characteristics, it was passed from Irish-speaker to Irish-speaker and incorporated all those quirks like 'I'm just after going...' or 'If it's a thing that...' and 'fill-um'.

And then of course there was the great catastrophe that wiped out so many Irish-speaking communities, and fixed Irish in the mind as something associated with poverty, hunger and a burden when you were heading to exile in an English-speaking country...

It's such an interesting topic, so many puzzling questions e.g. why Waterford and Louth kept the French back-of-the-throat 'uvular r' (listen to the 'r' in a local saying Drawwwda/Drogheda) but other Norman strongholds didn't...

Never a dull moment if you're interested in language and pronunciation

@MarieDeGournay that's very interesting, I'd love to study the history of language and accents. It's fascinating. I went to secondary school in a county town and some of the kids came in on buses from different rural villages, quite a large catchment area. I could distinguish the accent to each village, I'm long out of practice now. Same in Dublin, I lived there for a while in my 20s and in a few different rentals, the accent in each area differed slightly. Why??!

Alice in Wonderland has both 'press' and 'the messages'. And certainly 'press' and I think 'messages' also were still in use in Scotland in the earlier 20thc - and possibly to this day.

Because the Irish language was there first, there can be a tendency for some people to think of English as something alien foisted on us. In fact it started to evolve on this island at the same time as on the other island. The elements that went into it included Irish, old Norse, French, Latin as well as the different English forms spoken in Southern England, Cheshire and Scotland. No wonder it has a different vocabulary, grammar, and accents than the London and Oxbridge accent that started to become dominant in the 19th c and then fixed in place by radio. It is one of our two native languages, and our form of it is as valid as the others spoken in these islands.

Yes absolutely.

Lots of mainly English people, feel the way Irish people speak is "wrong" & "stupid"

I don't mind good hearted comments but that's not the sentiment by English people a lot of the time.

ANOTHER zombie thread resurrected from 2 years ago. What's going on? that's 3 I have seen today!

It must have been a vintage year! 😂

That is really interesting