When moving away from home, you always seem to encounter something new. A sight, a sound, a sensation, everything that's not natural to you can seem new. Even when you feel lost, there is one thing that might put you at ease no matter where you are - hearing someone speak your language.
Now, I don't just mean being able to speak Italian or Portuguese (but if you do find someone speaking them, then even better), but what I mean is finding someone who understands the same regional dialect as you. By dialect, I mean spoken words and by spoken words, I mean the running jokes from your town/city/hamlet/cave you somehow encountered.
Now, I might be sentimental uni student, but I'm a sentimental uni student who moved at least 4/5 hours from home. A northerner who moved down south just to get an education in their chosen field. Gotta say, after being here over two months.... I do miss my home dialect. How we don't pronounce certain letters, but emphasise others, how we manage to not only sound like we belong here, but sound like we shouldn't originally be from their either.
To put into context, my home is on the border of England, situated in Wales, meaning many years ago we were one of the first to be invaded. Due to this funny phenomenon, nobody who lives there sound like they come from there. Even in the situation I'm in, when I mention "Oh, I'm from ______" , the first immediate response is "Oh! You don't sound like you're from there!", to which I use the excuse blame my dad.
Now, this is even funnier because I have a roommate, a lovely Italian girl called Federica (she also has a blog, which I shall link later), and you can fully tell she's from Italy. Rather than ask her "Oh, where're you from?" they go "Oh, which part?" which is totally understandable. You can tell she's not local, she's flown to a university in England and decided to get an education here (love ya Feds, please don't leave so soon).
The funny thing about this situation for me is sitting right next to her, people just assuming that I'm local or something. There's slang here that I have never even heard of, let alone said until I got here. The irony of all of this is, I'm technically foreign too, same as if someone from Scotland came down to England to study. We got the flag, we have our own language, we passed the tests there.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not annoyed or confused about this situation. I'm just laughing at the fact that dialects vary so much to the point some don't get noticed.
You can tell who's from the north and south depending on certain choices or usage of words. "Calm" and "Sound" are used more down here, but you can guess what they mean in context. More up north, you'd hear more "legit" and "noice" more often, but the fun of it is being able to hear that dialect.
While everyone has different accents and characteristics, dialects vary from place to place. I've also noticed conflicting views for certain areas (Manchester and Liverpool as we head up north) for their reputations. It's funny to hear these views, but holding back on the urge to say "let's go travel there" is a bit of a bummer as they're too far.
Now that rant might've gotten a tad off topic, but it was a spur of the moment, especially when reflecting on returning home. Since the start of this blog, it's been nice to voice opinions openly, rather than have them swirl in my head.
To all you in universities right now, you're doing great and don't let your thoughts just be bottled up all the time. You're valid and your voice should be heard too!
-R (29/11/2020)
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