Élaina (voiceover):     For as long as I can remember I have spoken more than one language. When I tell people I grew up in a bilingual household they often ask me which language is my first language, but I honestly don't know. I was born in Canada and my mother tongue is French because that is literally what I speak with my mother. But my father taught me English at the same time even though that is not his native language. Then when I was 8, my family moved to Italy and my formative childhood years were spent in Italian. But I think that the question ‘what is your native language?’ is also a question about identity. And my answer will always be complicated. Now I'm an adult on the cusp of moving across the world again and trying to learn two non-European languages has prompted me to reflect on how language has shaped who I am and who I am becoming.

Sadie (voiceover): My mum’s Polish but she’s not from Poland. She was born in Edinburgh. I have a memory of being maybe about seven and drawing a picture of myself. I was trying to work something out and it was something that I already understood to be quite complicated. First, I coloured my arms and face in yellow. In the code I’d made up for myself, yellow meant Scottish. Next, I did my legs in green. My legs were Irish because dad said that I had quite long legs like all his side of the family did, my Irish family. Then I coloured my arms and torso in purple, which meant Polish. I’d lived all of my life in Scotland but at that age I was proud that I wasn’t only Scottish. In school we sang O Flower of Scotland and learned about Robert Burns but I was proud that my family had other languages and other accents too. Even if they didn’t quite belong to me.

Lisa (voiceover): Hi everyone. I’m Lisa and I’m going to tell you a story about moving across Germany, home, and different regional ways of greeting someone in German.

In the spring of 2017, I was working at the University of Hamburg in Northern Germany, and I had just started my PhD in linguistics. Then one day my boss told me that she had found another job at a different university in a city called Bamberg, or in German [German pronunciation] Bamberg. She said that she would love to take me and my colleagues with her and that I should think about moving with her. To Bamberg. To the other side of the country. The news came as a shock.

Helen (voiceover): Where is home for you? Is it where you were born, a place that you found later in life, or wherever you happen to be laying your head that night? I was born on the southwest coast of England. Growing up in a small seaside town, I never quite felt like I belonged. It didn’t feel like the town matched my idea of myself or that I could really be who I wanted to there. For as long as I can remember I was set on leaving this sleepy place by the sea and stepping out into the world to find the place that really would feel like home.

Claire (voiceover): I’m Claire Needler and I live and work in the north east of Scotland. In this podcast I’m thinking about Doric, the variety of Scots traditionally spoken in this area. Here’s a clip of two broad Doric speakers from Peterhead, a fishing town about 20 miles away from where I live.

Female voice 1: We were brought up with richt grammar.

Female voice 2: Ah ken. Even though it was Doric you had to say the richt thing. Kind of.

Female voice 1: Aye.

Female voice 3: You’d get slapped round the lug.

Female voice 1: Aye, just exactly.

Alejandra: Pololo or polola. Pololear. Of course, you know, I don't even know if that is being used right now.

Charles (voiceover): Meet Alejandra Cole: a Spanish teacher from Santiago, Chile, who's lived in the United states for 28 years. In addition to being a Spanish teacher she is also a member of my family. The sort of aunt where if you ever asked how we were related it would take a lot of diagramming and explaining. So let's just say aunt in the most nebulous of ways for now. We sat down to talk about her experiences navigating a language and diaspora.

Maria: How you speak is who you are. I’m fascinated by the idea of being able to control my identity and how I present to other people using my accent. When I write, I often change up my handwriting imagining the different versions of myself I could be, and I wish I could do that with my speech as well. For example, one of the things my accent can convey is my connection to a place. When I arrived in the States as a teenager, attending a high school in North Carolina, I spontaneously started speaking like the other girls I was friends with. I remember at the time it was really cool to say phrases like “that’s so sketchy” or “I can’t even” and I definitely imitated a close friend of mine who was pronouncing words like street and strong as street and strong [different pronunciation]. If I have any trace of Americanness in the way I speak now, it’s a leftover from that time.

Veronica (voiceover): My first experience with a different language than my mother tongue wasn’t ideal or pleasant. I was eight years old and was leaving my homeland, Argentina, to search for a better life in Sicilia, my grandmother’s birthplace, with my whole family. I had never taken a plane before, so I was extremely out of my comfort zone already.

Listening to several announcements both in Italian and Spanish during this journey contributed to increase my fear for the new place and culture I was heading to. Words in these cousin romance languages were quite similar but still different. For me as a child that was just confusing. However, I tried to keep a positive vibe in order to make things go easier, but when no one at the airport in Sicily could translate the customs questions into Spanish for my mum I knew it wouldn’t have been a walk in the park.

Leon: My name is Leon. Leon Żydowski [Anglicised pronunciation] or Żydoswki [Polish pronunciation] more like.

Julia: My name is Julia [Anglicised pronunciation] Stachurska. People that know that I’m Polish sometimes call me Julia [Polish pronunciation] but usually just call me Julia [Anglicised pronunciation]. That’s what I prefer.

Sadie (voiceover): Leon and Julia both moved from Poland to Scotland as kids. Leon was five when he moved, and Julia was seven.

Leon: I remember my first day, when I didn’t want to leave my mum’s arms because I don’t want to go. I was scared. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anyone, or I didn’t even know the language.

Julia: We came here basically knowing no English at all and just had to sort of learn on the job, if you like. So I was just inserted into a primary three class in Motherwell and had to learn English that way.

Dick van Dyke: Alright, ladies and gents. Comical poems suitable for the occasion. Extemporised and thought up before your very eyes. Alright, here we go.

Sadie: I know I’ve said before on this podcast that there’s no such thing as a bad accent, that accents are not objectively good or bad but have values attached to them which stem from discrimination and prejudice against the speakers of that variety. And I do stand by that, I absolutely do, but then there’s Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

Dick van Dyke: With Andrew. Hello Andrew.

Sadie: Now I love Dick van Dyke just as much as everyone else does but that is a bad accent.

Dick van Dyke: Your daughters were shorter than you, but they grew.

Sadie: This episode is about acting and accents. Everyone can recognise a dodgy version of their own accent, but here we’ll be digging into the linguistics of what exactly it is that actors are getting wrong. We’ll be looking at some of the difficulties that actors face, the times when it goes right and the times when it goes a bit pear shaped.

Agnieszka Checka grew up in Poland. She started learning English as a small child.

Agnieszka: I’ve always heard that English was this language that you learn if you want to be successful in life and I think me going to extra English classes was a further emphasis on that. I think the main association was if you know English you will be able to do more with your life.

Sadie: Agnieszka says that there was a sense of urgency in her learning of English as a kid. Not being able to speak English felt like a barrier.

Agnieszka: Maybe what it meant to me when I was younger was feeling -- just feeling left out from this bigger narrative that -- and these conversations that Europe was having. I think maybe because of the nature of the history of Poland implicates -- implicates? -- implies that we were a bit separated for a long time, for decades, and when that separation was no longer there, I think there was this intense need to -- felt by some, not others -- to definitely belong.

Why don’t all humans speak the same language? The Old Testament explains it like this: once upon a time, after the great flood, we did. Then, as humans so often do, we got a bit big for our boots. We decided to build a city and a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. God punished us by splitting us up into lots of different language groups, making it so that we couldn’t understand each other. We were cursed with multilingualism. The curse of Babel.

In my time researching language in education, I’ve come across this idea again and again in different forms: that multilingualism is a curse or, if not a curse, then at least an inconvenience.

Baby Harris is two months old. He’s never said a word. Never said something stupid at a party and regretted it the next day. Never accidentally called someone by the wrong name. Never told someone he loves them. He can’t talk yet but that doesn’t mean he isn’t working on it. Here’s his mum Angie telling me about his best efforts:

Angie: That’s the other thing he’s been doing in the past two weeks, is just so many more noises. Like now he has a little giggle when he laughs or when he smiles. He definitely has different noises for when he’s grumpy, and different noises for when he’s just happy or when he’s just talking to himself. Or when he’s trying to -- he’s looking at your mouth a lot, so it looks like he -- and he says things basically, almost like he’s trying to talk because he’s copying you, basically. He does that a lot more. Lots of noises now. Not just -- he used to just grunt all the time; he still does. [baby crying] He’s still just crabby. You going to be super crabby today?

Do you want to just introduce yourself?

Justin: Yes, I’m Justin Currie. I sometimes play in a group called Del Amitri and I write songs and make solo records.

Sadie: When Justin started playing gigs in the early 80s, he didn’t feel like singing in a Scottish accent was an option at all.

Justin: No music I liked was sung in a Scots accent at all. The only things sung in a Scots accent would be if you turn on some desperate tartan, shortbread, music show on the telly, like Thingummyjig or something, and it would all be that sort of very exaggerated kind of Scottish, Donald Where’s Your Troosers sort of nonsense, and that was just complete naff to people like us.

Sadie: At that point, most Scottish pop, rock, indie, alternative, and punk singers sang in accents which were very different from their speaking voices. The accents singers tended to use were somewhere between southern British-English and American, often referred to as Transatlantic accents. Justin was also really influenced by punk music with its roots in London.

We all have more than one way of speaking. For some people their linguistic repertoire includes more than one language.

This is my friend Emilia. She’s seven.

Emilia: When it’s my first day sometimes I get mixed up. See when it was my first day and I was talking to my best friend. I was talking to her in Polish.

Sadie: By mistake?

Emilia: And when the teacher asked me if I’m here I said [speaks in Polish] and that means “yes, I am” in Polish and I just went [speaks in Polish] and that’s my teacher from the Polish school.

My friend Jenny didn’t grow up posh, but people often assume she did because of her accent, which, in her words, is a lot posher than she is.

Jenny: My mother didn’t really do anything, at least not anything legal. My dad did lots of different things, but he was a manual labourer and things like that. We were quite poor growing up, we weren’t well off or things like that. And so, I kind of felt a really -- that I had a really strong working-class identity and a voice that didn’t match that at all.

Sadie: Jenny was born in Nottingham and moved to the Borders when she was eight. Shortly after that she ended up in foster care, moving from home to home for the rest of her childhood. People who meet Jenny as a care leaver are often surprised when they hear her accent. People who know her by her accent first are often surprised when they find out that she used to be in care.