I know I had a strong Australian accent as a child, not because I remember it but because I remember the affect it had on other people.

When I started school in Scotland, teachers would come in from other classrooms to encourage me to speak so they could hear my curious sound. Kids aren't fans of difference; this didn't help integrate me with my peers.

I wasn't aware of it going holus bolus but, quickly, it was gone to be replaced by something far worse. I had not lost my Aussie accent to sound like my classmates – I had lost it only for it to be replaced by some neutral, location-less Scottish inflection that sounded, inexplicably, posh.

This was a disaster. Children who lived on my street, but who I didn't go to school with due to this new (to me), strange (to me), religious segregation, used to shout "posh Catriona" when I went past.

Kids in my class asked why I sounded so posh. The social stigma was horrendous. I was outcast.

When I finally made it through my school years and on to university, I met genuinely posh people with genuinely posh accents and suddenly felt I sounded too common to fit in there. Outcast again.

A piece in the Guardian newspaper last week asked if it's possible to lose an accent. I'm here to say you can. Even when I return to Australia the old childhood sounds fail to emerge, although I retain some strange vowels. I worked for Bankwest for six months in Sydney and no one could understand a thing I was saying.

"Are you Canadian?" they'd ask. "Oh, you're Irish." For sport, and revenge, I would consistently switch the B and the W around and no one once picked me up on it.

When I speak to another Australian I can feel my accent changing. You feel it, rather than hear it. It's all about mouth shape and tongue placement. But it sounds only like I'm mocking them, rather than returning to my roots.

The interesting thing about the Australian accent, and which sets it apart from the language in the UK, is that it's relatively classless and largely uniform. The country is 4000km wide and nearly the same long but no matter which compass point you travel to, you're not going to hear much regional difference.

The Australian accent apparently flowed from the first Australia-born colonial children, offspring of the British settlers in Sydney in the late 18th century.

Like text-speak and teenage slang, this group would have begun to mimic each other's speech patterns in order to form a community.

It's also very difficult to copy, as evidenced by any American actor who's attempted it. I love Elizabeth Moss but what the heck was that in Top of the Lake? The otherwise gripping crime drama was ruined by her extravagant butchering of the Aussie accent.

In the UK the impression of accents are tied into their regions' cultural and economic powers. People who speak "properly" are assumed to be more intelligent and worldly.

Of course, these assumptions and stereotypes are incorrect and merely tell you what we project onto people due to our own biases about class and intellect.

Accent bias south of the border is thriving, according to a recent survey of thousands of young people in the north of England and the Midlands who said they were concerned their speech patterns would count against them in a way that those from the south of England were not concerned about.

A quarter of adults in the survey from the Sutton Trust said their accents had been mocked or criticised at work, which seems - excuse me for getting technical here - totally nuts.

Who are these people? Surely there's nothing more pleasing, approachable and engaging than northern accents with their Saxon grammars and malleable vowels.

Accents are fascinating things, aural histories of a person's life experiences, social status and roots. It's for shame that people are still made to feel they have to smooth and reshape their vowels to fit in or succeed.

Some of us change how we speak depending on the perceived social class of the person we're speaking to - "code switching" - and some of us change our accents to sound more or less like where we've come from. It's an unsettling thing, a different voice for different occasions.

It can leave you with a sense of never really knowing who you are or worrying that other people see you as a fraud.

Accent is such an essential part of self, a guide to your home and background and the moves they've made through the years.

In an era when identity is king, it's a last taboo that accent is part of identity that is not respected and, in fact, acceptable to disrespect.

Read more from Catriona Stewart:

Only children face the worst stigma, even though we're the best

Manston horrors show Suella Braverman's failure on migration

The Glasgow school bike bus is the future we need to see