You just get started. My talk is about language and how accents and language shape and form our identity. And those of you with perhaps an inference accent may have already formed an impression of my identity just from what I've been saying so far. And I may even fall some of you in believing that I'm more sophisticated than I really am. But it was George Orl said in the 1930s that all Englishmen branded on the tongue from birth, that you could tell so much about someone from the moment they opened their mouth in particular, not just the region of England from which they came, but also the social class they aspired to. My parents both come from working class backgrounds to opposite ends of England. My father from the suburbs in civil service of London and my mother from a northern mining town. And growing up, my parents would have sounded like me at home. In fact, my accent owes nothing to their geography or to their class. Now all this talk of class, it was a century ago that George Burnett Shaw wrote that no Englishman can open his mouth without another despising him. And it's still remarkably true today, 100 years on, that so much has judged in England, by the way, you speak, assumptions about pretension and status are all formed based on your language. And I was born in the town of Maclosfield, which is at the perfect center point of my parents origins. In the 2004 Times newspaper survey in England, it was listed as the most culturally deprived town in England. But it's a town with a rich cultural history that dates back as far as the 1086 Duma-Sae survey of the land, during the time when in the conquer. And at that time, the 11th century, it fell within the borders of the Hundred of Hamiston, which sounds sort of game of thrones. But it's just the old English word, meaning a division of land that houses 100 homesteads. And the reason I mentioned this is because it's sort of the perfect pronunciation test for aspiration, the aspirate in England so much depends on it, the H sound. Those who drop their H as a considered unforgivably crude and working class. And growing up in Maclosfield, I adopted its regional accent. So to me, it was the 100 homesteads of Hamiston. And there's a particularly snobby class of people who would sort of turn their nose up with that in England. And that touches on a long history of anxiety over the letter H in England. There's so much concern over it that in fact, H has now become a legal variant of the letter form in British English. And one theory for this is just that school children who are being repeatedly told not to drop their Hs as a hyper corrected and added them where they really just don't exist at all. And in the early 19th century, the words hotel, hospital, and herb were all actually pronounced without the H in Britain. Now, it's interesting and how that's changed. I mean, America has actually clung on to its H-less herb. And that's perhaps because it has less class, less class anxiety associated with its language. But let's not stop. At H, the store was also brought to you by the letter R. When I introduced myself to Canadian sometimes, they've a hard time picking at my name. I've had Mac and Mark and even Mark. And that's because my very ordinary name Mark sits on a sort of an important pronunciation divide in our languages that letter R, well, they call that roticism. And some mistakenly believe that Canadian English has actually diverged from the original British English. But in fact, the reverse is true that British English was once rotic. And it was only after the American War of Independence that Brits began to drop their Hs. That's a sort of a joke. And I asked for a nasty here. And one of the reasons the main reasons for this is because during that time, the 19th century, the upper classes were reacting against the new rich, who brought with them a great deal of they were powering the industrial revolution. They brought a great deal of social wealth with them, but particularly not social honor. So the upper class began to codify their language in order to separate themselves, distinguish themselves. Now, Canadians have held on to their ars, but they haven't adopted the British phenomenon of the you and the non-you, the non upper class words on the left and the upper class variance of them on the right. And this comes from a 1950s essay published by the linguist, Alan Ross, that set out these differences in cultural vocabulary and social vocabulary. The middle classes on the left represented by Kate and Will on the right, the upper class version. And this is touched on a big anxiety in that time in the middle classes who were eager for climb in their social standings. So the echoes of this impact are still reverberating in British English today. Now, language is continually evolving. And each generation speaks differently to the one before. The younger and older generations are continually jostling and jousing over pronunciation divides like H and H, and whether it's dessert or pudding. But English adapts. It's a very fluid language. Not all of us lucky to evolve and adapt as quickly. Some are at the whims of history and the circumstances of their politics. My family left England when I was eight years old and we moved to Luxembourg, a country. I won third the size of the GTA that's an SLT between France, Germany, and Belgium. That's still an SLT. And my went to a European school, which is sort of a tower of Babel of languages. There were 11 languages taught in my school. And my English accent and my vocabulary are very shaped by that experience and that environment. And some English people actually argue that I don't really have an accent, I speak sort of an international English. But that's really not true. Everybody has an accent except perhaps the mute. And there are 7,000 languages in the world today. And some say there may only be 1,000 by the end of this century. Some languages, I spoke Luxembourgish growing up. Luxembourg is very proud and protective of its language. I spoke it with my village friends. I lived in a village. And sorry, I lost my place. So I wanted to say here that Luxembourgish is now on the endangered UNESCO language list. And when a language dies, it's incredibly sad. It's like the death of a species. Mivoda Blavin, Mokvezin, and Luxembourg means we wish to remain who we are. And I think language is incredibly important. And I just want to end on a quote from Clemos. He said that he was a patriot, but not a nationalist. And people asked him to get the French Prime Minister to clarify. And he said, I think a patriot loves this country, but a nationalist hates others. I feel like we should all be very patriotic of our own language, but respectful of the identities and influence of others. Thank you.