In terms of accents, I’m in a sort of no man’s land. I moved to Scotland from the Netherlands as a child and was lucky to learn English young enough to lose any traces of a Dutch accent. As an adult, I’ve lived in London for almost a decade. The Scots think I sound English, the English say I sound Scottish – and the Dutch, well, they think I just sound a bit strange.

You would think that one benefit of my upbringing would be an adeptness at moulding my accent at will. Not exactly. During my secondary school’s production of An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, I used what I thought was flawless Queen’s English for my character. Years later a friend from school told me that not only did I sound awful – embarrassingly I was the only one who had enthusiastically adopted a fake accent for a role.

Of course, you only need to watch Oscar-winning actors to note that accents can be changed at will. Meryl Streep’s flawless English in her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher is but one example. (Ironic, perhaps, as Thatcher famously tweaked her own Lincolnshire voice to sound a bit posher.)

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But for most of us, changing our accents can be tiring and unnatural. Our accent forms a part of our identity. To change it is to lose an aspect of ourselves. Over time many of us do find themselves making small – or large – changes. Why we do so gives us a window into the fundamental role our voices play in our social world.