Jag pratar inte svenska

“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”

The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré

For most of my life, how I talk has been the thing that has often contributed to my feeling of being an outsider, rather than the language itself. Moving to Scotland at the age of five with a distinctively English accent, I was immediately set apart by my peers – ostracised, too, often, even into my teenage years, when my accent had shifted a little. But even with an English or Scottish twang to my voice, I never developed a full “accent” that was localised in the sense that we take accents to be. 

I was an anomaly even within my family: two of my brothers had retained a fairly northern English accent, and the third had adopted the slightly more upper class lilt that came from his time in Cambridge. My dad, for all his adoptions of local Aberdonian phrases, still to this day sounds much like the English boarding school child he was, and although I can’t hear it, people reliably tell me my mum has a “foreign accent”. Whatever that means.

And then there was me. Sometimes a little English, sometimes a little Scottish. For years before I moved to Canada, I was misjudged to be either American or Canadian, presumably as a result of the decidedly neutral way of speaking I’d taken on. I blamed that on language: the sounds of Finnish are a complicated mismatch against English, and my best guess was that just as my mother to this day can’t say certain English sounds in the right order on account of Finnish being her mother tongue, I couldn’t have switched between English and Finnish with a heavy British accent blocking my way, such as that typical in either Manchester or Aberdeen. As the only child left in the family who was bilingual, and the one most travelled, this seemed to make sense.

It gets a little tiring trying to explain where you’re from all the time, and why you sound the way you do. Rarely am I just accepted as being in the right place that I must belong to. This didn’t get better with a linguistics degree where the first field on every piece of phonetics coursework was to note your accent, in order for the lecturer to accurately grade your work. How was I supposed to answer that? I wrote a combination of several (Scottish Standard English, Received Pronunciation, Standard American English) followed by a question mark.

I was called to stay back after class.

“You can’t have three accents,” my lecturer protested.

“I don’t have three accents,” I argued back. “I have one. Mine. It’s just not compatible with the official accent designations.”

The more I spoke, the more I could see him understand my predicament. “I’ll just assume you know your own vowel sounds,” he said hurriedly, gave my coursework a tick, and sent me on my way.

I’d so long been mistaken as being Canadian that when I moved there, I figured no one would question it. Yet the real North Americans could sense me as being a foreigner, and no amount of to-mae-toes or a-loo-min-um could fool them. 

This year has been a little different, because in many of the countries I’ve been in, it’s the fact that I don’t speak the language that will give me away before my accent. Not everywhere, certainly: in Lisbon, it seems like practically no one speaks Portuguese, and my efforts at learning a simple phrase were wasted on people who could only respond in English.

In Italy, I had a bit of an upper hand. It took one look at me for Italians to decide I couldn’t possibly speak their language (what in the blonde, fair, blue eyes gave me away, I wonder?) and then would send them reeling when I’d respond back in Italian. My favourite was the waiters outside the restaurants who would say all manner of stuff about foreign tourists to each other as I passed, so that when they called out asking why I wouldn’t come to dinner, I could bite back in flawless Italian, ho già mangiato! (I have already eaten!) and watch their look of horror at all I must have understood.

The Nordic countries, then, bring the opposite problem. In the blonde, fair, blue eyes, I am instantly assumed to be a local and spend an unfortunate amount of time mumbling, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak ____” and avoiding their equally confused and disappointed look. The follow-up to this is usually to ask, then, where am I from? The quickest answer to this is Finland – it’s the answer they’re looking for. It explains why I look the way I do, somewhat why I sound the way I do, but also why I don’t speak their language. Because where there is a degree of interchangeability between the other Nordic languages, Finnish is the outlier. 

A cashier in a small convenience store in Stockholm rephrased the question once, asking me instead, “what language do you speak?” I told her Finnish and her eyes widened. “Oh, no! But Finnish is so difficult!” I laughed. We were best keeping to English.

There are many things I love about being in the Nordic countries. I like the way that everyone converges onto the green spaces of Copenhagen the moment the sun comes out, savouring the ability to be outdoors after a long winter. I like the thrum of the community hub of the library in Helsinki, the children playing at one end of the long room while the pensioners read newspapers at the other, old and young together. I like the smell of cardamom on the breeze as a I head toward what I have been reliably told is the best bakery in the Stockholm (and it was). I like that on the hottest day of the summer, I was not the only person valiant running the hills of Oslo. 

I like that every now and again, someone will say something in their language, that I do not speak, but I can guess words or context clues just enough to be able to reply, “nei, takk” with enough confidence that they never guess I’m a foreigner. I like that I feel like I belong in this part of the world, even when my language hasn’t quite caught up to my being.

In a lifetime spent trying to find a place that feels like home, I think I’ve probably known where it is all along.