Yesterday, as I write this, I attended church services in Tampa for the first time in more than thirteen years. The last time I lived in Tampa was in early May of 2011, before I moved to Thailand, and after living there for a bit more than a year, I have lived in the Pacific Northwest at various places within the Portland metropolitan area. It had been so long since I had lived in Tampa that I had never been to the building that they have owned just south of downtown Zephyrhills for years until yesterday, though I have seen it many times on webcast, especially during Covid times. Anyway, I figured I had not been in the area for long enough so I felt it necessary and proper to fill out a space in the guestbook. After not living in an area for long enough, one loses one’s hometown privileges, I suppose.

One of the most remarkable things about the visit, to me, was the way that some people did not look any different over the course of the years it had been. Some people, of course, I had seen recently and so I knew how they looked, and the young people especially, for the most part, had aged (and some middle aged people had become old), but quite a few people looked just as they always had. Some people recognized me quickly, though many did not. At least a few people, though, recognized me not from the way I looked, but from the way I sounded. One person in particular, who I had known from childhood as we both went to church in Lakeland back in the day–she had arrived in the area and started attending shortly before my mother’s family moved down to the area from Groton, Connecticut. She had heard me talk as a child, and apparently, four decades after I was first in that area, I still sound the same as I always did.

This has always proven to be a bit of a puzzle for me. Where does my voice come from? If it has remained constant for decades, to the point where people who do not recognize my relatively plain and somewhat common looks as being distinctive enough to be more than vaguely familiar can know exactly who I am, it must be an unusual voice by the standards of the area of rural Central Florida where I grew up. Yet while it must be an unusual voice to begin with, it cannot have had too many influences on it. The influence of my neighbors in Central Florida appears to have been slight, as I do not talk like a rural Southerner. I have always thought there was a good deal of Pittsburgh in the accent, but aside from the pronunciation of words like creek (crick), Steelers (Stillers), and the like, my accent is not a particularly harsh example of Pittsburghese, it must be admitted. Whatever the influences, they must have come early in life, when I had not lived anywhere other than Western Pennsylvania and Central Florida, when I had not traveled much beyond the area between those two places for the Feast of Tabernacles, and when it was my family that was the major influence on my speaking. Perhaps there are bits of Middle Atlantic or Eastern Ontario (the area around Peterborough) or perhaps a bit of Northern Chesapeake (from Maryland), but it’s hard to figure out exactly the blend of elements that came into my voice, but it has come with me for a long time, with its particular lilt, the over-pronunciation of words, and all that comes with my speaking that has been there since I was small.

How common of a phenomenon is this? Is it usual for people to form their voice when they are small and keep that voice with them over the course of a long and complicated life full of education, full of travel, full of moving to different areas where one is around a variety of different dialects? There is something to be said for being able to mask one’s voice to fit in with those one happens to be around, but apparently the opposite is true for me as a rule, and my voice has remained distinctive now for forty years or so. If some of my readers would like to share their experiences with their own voice or the voice of others that has remained constant for long periods of time, I would be curious to hear more stories about such things.