Accents and choices of identity

Although I left my country of birth over ten years ago, and spoke English every single day since, I still have one. And I bet you have one, too – in fact as this article explains, we all have one… Accent.

For someone who is forever making an effort to polish theirs (English), I found this comment, from Felicity Cox, a doctor of linguistics at Sydney's Macquarie University, intriguing: "Accent is about identity, about group membership and how we want to express ourselves". 

Furthermore, while we are influenced by what we hear, she stresses that we make a conscious choice about our accents, which she coins "communicative accommodation". In Dr Cox’s words, "you accommodate with people you want to identify with and be like".

We have the choice to decide who we are. And one of the ways we do that is through our accents.
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