An accent carries places that a person may no longer have an address in.

Where someone has lived stays in the voice long after the house, the street and sometimes the country have gone. It can point back to a childhood town that no longer exists in the form they remember. People often hear it and ask where somebody is from, when the truer answer is where they have been and what they left.

Notice the impulse to treat a way of speaking as a question needing an immediate answer. If you are curious about someone, you will usually learn more by asking what they miss than by asking where they started.