This Is Not A
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Date: 18/10/12
Don't Talk Like That!
Does anyone else do this?
I have a terrible tendency, if the person I'm speaking to - whether in person or on the phone - has a distinct accent, to start talking in that accent myself.
It's completely unconscious, and I suspect that more than once it has brought me dangerously close to being rendered unconscious, somewhat on the lines of the old Conamara proverb, "Is minic a bhris béal duine a shrón" ("Many a man has had his nose broken by his mouth").
Some years ago, when I worked with a Scotsman, I was talking to him when he suddenly fixed me with a Caledonian glare and said, "D'ye have to do tha'?"
A few months back, I was talking to someone on the phone who was quite identifiably from a certain part of northern England. Suddenly, he asked me where I was from. I told him, and he said with something approximating to bemusement, "Yuv a fyine Geordie accent". I stammered my apologies and confessed that it was something I had no control over.
Only this past morning, another conversation, this time with someone from Bristol. I became very aware that I was doing it again. I don't think he noticed; or, if he did, he said nothing.
(There's a wonderful characteristic of the Bristol accent by the way, in that it abhors having a word ending in an unstressed vowel. Bristol was originally called 'Bridgestow'; this became 'Bristow' and - by dint of the process I'm describing - 'Bristol'. This gave rise to the wonderful example - which I think I read in Basil Cottle's delightful 1983 book Names - of the old Bristolian talking about his children: "I got three daughters. They're called Eval, Idal and Normal").
Some accents create more of this effect on me than others. I had studiously to avoid one (now-retired) colleague with a pronounced Northern Ireland accent because I just knew I wouldn't be able to stop myself.
I confess that I do sometimes do it on purpose. South Wales accents are particular favourites for this, if only because I have a number of colleagues who have them. So when talking to them, I find myself calling them 'butt' or saying things like, "There's traaagic, iznet?". Of course, they then think I'm taking the piss out of them, so I have to keep myself in check.
An albeit cursory hunt via my search engine of choice has failed to turn up a formal word to describe this phenomenon. I'm sure there must be one, and if there isn't then there bloody well ought to be, if only so that I know what I'm suffering from.
