Reviving an old thread (giving it midazolam?) to comment on how strange my accent is! I was raised in Scotland by a Scottish mother who'd picked up her Irish ex-husband's accent, an aunt who'd picked that up from my mother, a Cockney grandmother who faked Received Pronunciation (that plummy BBC Radio 3 voice), and a Scottish grandfather who'd kept his Scottish accent. My first high school, and the area I spent my late childhood/early to mid-teens in, was full of English kids with stereotype Home Counties accents, and my second high school was mostly made up of kids with Edinburgh and Glasgow accents who tried to fake posh accents. My twin got dragged into faking a posh accent at my first school, the only high school he went to, and sounds plain silly these days as, whilst he can't shake it off, he speaks Scottish vernacular. Hearing "aye, dear" in a fake posh accent is excruciating, but I can't talk. I've had my accent described as "unintelligible"!
I'm considering making a Youtube channel to talk about epilepsy and raise awareness, but I'm nervous because of my voice. Because of my sex chromosome deformity, it's very high-pitched and girlish for a 20-year-old man, but the main problem is the accent. Most people I've talked to on the phone who live outside Scotland, Ireland, or the north of England can't work out a word I say. It's embarrassing.