Maria's Story

“I don’t sound Scottish… when someone looks at me, they wouldn’t think that I’m Scottish… but that doesn’t prevent me from feeling really at home in a Scottish environment.”

Maria Dokovova has been living in Scotland for ten years, but she doesn’t have a Scottish accent. How would her life be different if she did?  

You can find the transcript for this episode here.

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Over the past year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working with a group of people from all over the world, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. Everyone who took part was brand new to podcasting, and most of the episodes were made without any professional equipment, using mobile phones and free editing software. The results of this course are seven episodes: each one about a very different migration experience, and each person bringing their own style and personality. We hope you love them as much as we do.

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From Maria:

I am originally from Bulgaria and I have lived in Edinburgh for the last ten years. During that time, I collected a couple of degrees, including PhD in Phonetics from Queen Margaret University. Right now, I am finishing a Master’s programme in Speech and Language Therapy and I am hoping to start practicing soon. I love learning about people’s stories about their accents and recently I started the #AccentPositivity campaign for Bilingualism Matters with this blog post. You can share your accent story using #AccentPositivity and you can find me on twitter @drdokovova. 

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You can find out more about Bilingualism Matters here, and you can find their, podcast Much Language Such Talk, here and on the podcast streaming apps.

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