I Don't Have an Accent, You Do

“I’m sorry, I cannot understand you through your thick accent.” It is something I have heard my entire life from different people I have met. The only problem is, where I am from, everyone can understand me perfectly. When I ask for a glass of water at a local establishment, I am never questioned about what “wadder” is from the waiter. When I talk about one subject or another – usually rambling – everyone understands and is able to converse back because we don’t actually have accents. What people hear as accents is the cadence of speaking that a particular region has. We hear that way of speaking and then develop our speech with what we have already heard previously. It is the same concept as someone who has only read a word and never actually heard it spoken. They mispronounce the word because they have never actually heard it said out loud before. Words like Linux or acai come to mind. Your parents say words a certain way and then you say those words the same way because it is all you have ever heard. Oftentimes you will find people with more muddled accents when their households contain more than one nationality of people. That person hears their grandparent’s foreign accent, one of their parent’s more Americanized accent, and then their other parent’s fully Americanized accent. This person will then not be so influenced by one sound or the other. They sound “normal” and everyone only hears slight variations in their speech. And don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that hearing an accent is a bad thing. If the person you are talking to asks where you are from because they heard an accent, it is a conversation starter and can help connect more people. The problem arises when derision is in the listener’s voice. It always tickles my ribs when I hear someone poke fun at someone else’s accent because even when the accent is really noticeable like someone from Australia or Ireland, they are just talking in the manner they know to talk. In fact, it is kind of dumb to make fun of anyone’s “accent” because if the person poking fun was in the accented person’s home country or home region, that person wouldn’t be laughing when they were the one with the accent. I bet they would really enjoy their glass of water with that extra hard “T” if they were the butt of the joke. But that is just one man’s opinion. Thanks for listening to me ramble. I appreciate it. See you next time.