Oh, That English Accent!

Yesterday I wrote about listening to the audio version of “On Chesil Beach,” by Ian McEwan. Today I write about my first reaction to the first words pronounced in the recorded reading by the author himself. As soon as I heard that plummy, educated English accent, I melted and was completely drawn into the listening experience. At the same time, I had to laugh at myself for the almost knee-jerk positive reaction I have always had to that accent. Why do I always go a little gaga for it? Is it the somewhat common American feeling that somehow the British accent is more elegant, more educated, more intellectual, more mellifluous than the American accent(s)? Is it my frequent listening to Masterpiece Theater and other such British dramatic productions and films over the years? Is it my background as a person born in Canada to Canadian parents and raised in postcolonial India, with all the British-related aspects of each of those experiences? Is it simply part of my deep love of all things English, especially English literature? I have written directly or indirectly about my connection to England and English matters in various posts (e.g., on tea, 2/2/10; on my literary pilgrimage to Jane Austen sites, 2/18/10; on the colonial novels “Old Filth” and “The Man in the Wooden Hat,” 3/18/10; and on the Guardian UK, 9/19/10), as well as in my non-blog (academic) writing, but I haven’t written before about the visceral positive and a bit nostalgic (although I have never lived in England) feeling I get when I hear that lovely and – to me – evocative English accent. Of course I know that not all English, or British, people speak with that accent. And of course I understand intellectually that there is nothing inherently “better” about it; after all, I have studied linguistics and teach in a linguistics-informed field. My reaction is, I speculate, conditioned by my Canadian/Indian childhood and by my immersion in English literature for most of my life. It is personal, deeply embedded and, I suspect, ineradicable, even if I should want to eradicate it, which I do not.