It's the way you say it

'Some can do it by changing a few vowels, but a tragedy of my life is that I've never been able to get near imitating the Geordie accent'

I was musing yesterday about the pros and cons of a regional accent, and Sir Ian McKellen was doing so, too, on Sunday, with Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs, on which he said that he was probably the last of the North Country actors who felt that he had to erase his native accent and adopt RP, whereas after him, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay had felt comfortable keeping theirs. (Gandalf with a Lancashire accent? Mmm...)

But of course, if you want to be thought to have an accent, you don't have to adopt or keep the whole thing – all you have to do is throw in one or two brush strokes. There are people who can suggest a Geordie accent just by changing one or two vowels (it is one of the tragedies of my life that I have never been able to get near imitating the Geordie accent). I have heard people go authentically South African just by turning "black" into "blek".

Why, Charles Dickens did the same for cockney by making Sam Weller say "wery" instead of "very". When Weller said that something was "wery" bothersome, we knew immediately that he was speaking in a colourful cockney sort of way. This was always rather puzzlesome, because no cockneys within living memory have said "wery", so whether the cockney way of speaking has changed radically in 150 years, or whether Dickens had a bad ear for dialect, or simply a bad copy-editor, I do not know.

Another piece of shorthand along these lines is to suppose that Chinese and Japanese people cannot handle the letter "l" very well, tending to turn it into "r". (Hence the old joke about the diner in the Chinese restaurant who calls the Chinese waiter across and says, "Waiter, this chicken is rubbery!", and the waiter smiles and says, "Thank you vely much, sir".)

Ah, yes – there is a parallel cliché that they also cannot say "r" very well, and tend to turn it into "l". I did not believe this until, one day, I was sitting with a bunch of children in a Chinese restaurant and the waiter put all our dishes on a big revolving disc in the middle of the table, so that every child could rotate the disc till the dish they wanted was opposite them. "Just like lurette!" the waiter smiled to me. Lurette? What was that? Then it dawned. It was "roulette", with the "r" turned to "l" because he couldn't say "r", and the "l" turned to "r" because he couldn't say "l". It doesn't make sense, but that's what he said.

Some people affect peculiarities in their own speech as a mark of distinction. I am not talking about the Queen here, whose whole mode of speech sounds charmingly like the soundtrack of a 1950s film. I am thinking of people who retain just one or two archaisms in their vocabulary. I know one actress who still says "Brill!" quite unself-consciously, though nobody else has said it since the 1960s. My first wife used to use the expression "Whizzo!", although she was sane in all other respects.

It's not always people who sport peculiar speech habits. Whole nations do it. The Scots can still say the letter "r" with a roll, as if it were a proper consonant, whereas the English hardly even pay it lip-service. Spanish-speaking countries in South America do not lisp as Spain does. In Madrid, they wispily pronounce "Santa Cruz" as "Santa Cruth". In Latin America, they say "Santa Cruz", like an hombre should.

The whole of Canada has a speech oddity, too. I never used to be able to tell an American from a Canadian accent, until someone let me in on the secret that Canadians say the sound "ou" differently, more like "oo", so that "about" sounds like "aboot". I thought that this was highly unlikely until I started listening to Canadians for traces of this very vowel, and it was absolutely true.

Can this be a relic of the Canadian Scottish tradition? After all, we all know that the Scots say "hoose" instead of "house". There's a moose loose in the hoose. But this creates another difficulty, because there is already a word pronounced as "moose". How do the Scots deal with that?

Well, I can tell you, as a matter of fact, because when I was up in Perthshire at my cousin Laurence's for Hogmanay, I brought the subject up one day. And we had the following conversation:

Me: "Laurence, tell me, if you call a 'mouse' a 'moose', how do you Scots pronounce what we call a moose?"

Laurence: "We say 'caribou'."

So now you know.