I'm interested in the subject of at what age an accent becomes "fixed". A friend told me that he had moved a lot as a child and had always arrived with the wrong accent.

Belonging is terribly important when you are young, yet he had arrived in Wales with a Scottish accent, London with a Welsh accent and back to Scotland with a London accent, the worst of all possible worlds.

It is wonderful the way that as you get older a strange accent makes you more "interesting" than "strange" perhaps some small part of us evolves in the way that we find people from new places with (maybe) different perpectives, interesting, rather than a threat to our entire value system.