Last weekend I was, as ever, sitting in a bar with Soupy, my erstwhile friend in both the online and offline worlds. At one stage, as we sat there putting the world to rights, an English woman came up to us and started chatting. The woman in question was determined to tell us, over and over and over, just how sexy she found our Ulster brogues to be.
Well, who am I to argue with such an assessment? It seeems that for the English these days, the Ulster accent is in. Large English companies have opened call centres in Northern Ireland (NI) in the belief that their customers will respond better to bad news if it's delivered with that cute Ulster twang.
It wasn't always like this of course. When I was young, my accent was very far from being fashionable in the metropole. Back in the dog days of the 1980s, an Ulster accent was associated in the English mind with fat preachers and hairy terrorists. In short, it was a liability. This negative attitude started to shift in the 1990s, thanks to a heady combination of the peace process and James Nesbitt.
Now apparently, we Ulster folk are sexy. "What about ye?" is the new "How you doing?" We live in a faddish world though. Soon enough, the English will be going weak at the knees for a Soctish voice, or a Welsh voice, or a southern Irish voice and us Norn Iron people will have to go back to getting by on our looks and personality. A scary prospect for some of us.
But regardless of the fleeting prejudices of the English ear, I remain defiantly proud of my accent. I don't even have that strong a brogue. Other Belfast people could instantly discern that I am middle-class. I refer to my mother as "Mum" rather than "Ma". But still, when I'm in the company of people from outside NI, my voice sticks out like a sore thumb. My strange vowel sounds splash like great rocks into the placid lake of conversation.
I've been away from Belfast for most of the last three years. But in spite of straying from my hometown's poisonoius embrace, I'm glad to say that my accent has not changed a jot. I like to tell the Henry Kissinger anecdote at this stage. In the 1930s, Henry and his brother fled Nazi Germany for the US. The brother quickly developed an American accent but Henry, famously, still sounds like he just got off the boat from Hamburg. The reason for this vocal discrepancy between the Kissinger siblings? Simple. In order to take on the accent of those around you, you have to actually listen to what they're saying.
A few weeks ago I was chatting to a woman who I had just met. "Is this your first time in Asia?" I enquired. A non-descript piece of small talk, were it not for the fact that she had just spent the last five minutes teliing me about the six months she had lived in Indonesia. So, as long as I maintain my Kissinger-esque people skills, I'll keep my accent.
And what an accent it is. The Ulster brogue is beautiful, evocative, descriptive, emotional and magnificently colourful. I love the little idiosyncracies of our speech. The way that Belfast people will add a clarifictory tag at the end of their sentences: "Yer man's an eejit, so he is." Or the way that people from Derry will use "wile" instead of "very", as in: "Derry City are wile shite this season." Or the way that Ballymena people deploy "hey" as a full stop: "It's sunny today, hey"
When you hear an Ulster person shout "go on, ye boy, ye" it carries more primal urgency than any term in the so called Queen's English can muster. No phrase derived from the Thames estuary carries the same wonderful dismissiveness as the Belfast "ach, away on wi' ye." Quite simply, Ulster English can do things which other versions of the language can not.
Most of all there's the swearing. To hear an Ulster person enunicate the f-word, you are left in no doubt that you are in the presence of a sentient human being, an individual with a pulse. When you hear someone from the north of Ireland say "fuck" you know that this is a person who feels love, hate, lust, hope, fear, despair, anger and joy; possibly all in the space of the last five minutes.
There is no God, but let's just assume for a minute that there is. He would want everyone to speak their language like an Ulster person speaks English: idiosyncratically, with archaic slang and lots of glorious, unrepentant swearing. The Big Guy didn't put us on this earth to speak the stale, dead dialect of the south of England.
But my imaginary God may not get what He wants. The spread of mass media has already led to the flattening out of accents. The more that we all watch the same TV programmes and films, the more that we all start to sound like the people in them. In other words, one day, we'll all sound like David Beckham. God help us.