Before I moved from Germany to England, I found myself wondering if it would be strange to be surrounded by people speaking English all the time - and British English at that. After 4 straight years of living in Germany, I had gotten used to the sound of people speaking German around me, and though the language of my home life was English, everything else - the television and radio, shops and restaurants, overheard conversations and telephone calls - was German. And never having lived in a non-American-English-speaking-English-speaking country (it makes sense, believe me), I wasn’t sure if I would constantly be really aware of what language was being spoken around me all the time, or if I would perhaps even find so much English intrusive somehow.

Well, I’ve been here almost two months now, and though I certainly don’t find the English intrusive, the language difference is still giving me some food for thought. First of all, I think subconsciously I’m still expecting people to be speaking German all the time, because I often feel a moment of surprise whenever I overhear someone speaking English. It always takes a minute for it to sink in that this is England. Lots of people speak English here. And there are certain situations in which I still feel the urge to speak German; I tend to answer the phone with hallo instead of “hello," and my first instinct is always to say danke instead of “please" or Entschuldigung instead of “sorry" (which is really kind of funny, seeing as “sorry" is a whole lot easier to say than Entschuldigung).

What is quite odd here, however, is a personal linguistic phenomenon that I also notice whenever I spend time in Ireland: whenever I say something in public, I feel like I sound really, really American. I feel like all…um, ears are on me, like somehow my voice cuts through everyone else’s and draws attention to me and my American-ness. This is, of course, complete and utter nonsense. I do have an American accent, naturally, but I also have a habit of sometimes speaking so quietly in public that even the person I’m speaking to can’t hear me. And though my accent is immediately recognizable as being American, it’s a fairly neutral American accent with a vocabulary that has become slightly peppered with Anglicisms and Irish-isms. My accent is certainly not anything so intensely regional that people here would take special notice of it or have a hard time understanding me.

(And on a side note related to Anglicisms and Irish-isms: I really tried to avoid that speech-pattern-appropriation thing, because there are few things more pretentious than an American putting on a phony English accent just because he or she once had a conversation with someone from England and, you know, the accent just “rubbed off”. But even I could only hold out for so long, and though I certainly don’t - and never will - have an English or Irish accent, 6 years of dating an Irishman and accumulating friends from all corners of the English speaking world have certainly taken a toll on my vocabulary).

Anyway, I feel like my accent sticks out here even more than it did in Germany. This perhaps goes hand in hand with another phenomenon I have noticed: when I hear only one particular type of English being spoken day in and day out, be it British or Irish English or just strongly regional American English, it really does start to rub off on me - mentally, anyway.

This is particularly true when I visit Jeremy’s hometown in Ireland, where people have a very distinct, rather strong, sometimes incomprehensible accent. When everyone around me is speaking with that accent and I hear it for days and days, then I start to hear my own thoughts “voiced" in that accent. After a while, when I open my mouth to speak, I half-expect my words to be spoken with the same Irish lilt that everyone around me has - and I get a bit startled when, in fact, they come out sounding like they always sound: American. And because I’m not expecting them to sound American at all, they always seem to sound extremely American.

To be honest, I couldn’t even deliberately put on a fake Irish accent if my life depended on it, so I’m certainly not going to spontaneously acquire such an accent by spending a few days in Ireland. And I’m not going to get an English accent just because everyone around me has an English accent. But occasionally I find that my thoughts are getting an English accent, which in a way is perhaps even worse: not only do I have voices in my head, but they’re turning into pretentious voices with multiple personalities. It’s all quite disturbing when I think about it, really. Blimey.

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