My Accent as a (Non-)Reflection of My Identity
I never thought much about my accent, really in any context, until I left the place where everyone sounds like me.
These days I'm meeting a lot of people who have a hard time understanding what I'm saying when I speak French, and a lot of Canadians and Brits who speak different English than I do. Combine those experiences with the fact that my classes are taught in French by professors with various accents (Congo, Naples) and mostly deal with the subject of linguistics? I've been thinking about it a lot more than I ever have.
Most of the anglophones I meet in this country immediately say "Oklahoma? Really? But you don't sound like you're from Oklahoma!" The American-inclined ones might add "Actually, you don't have an accent at all." Most of these people have never been anywhere near Oklahoma, though some of them are American (Californians, I'm looking at you).
It's true that I scorn the word "y'all" and try not to drop the g's off of my present participles, but I think I sound like most educated Oklahomans. The longer I'm away from there, the less alienated I feel from that place -- that is to say, the more I feel like it's a part of me, and the less annoyed about it I become. There are a lot of things I love about it. However, the backward politics is definitely not one of them.
But back to the subject of accents. I think I never identified with my maternal language as a source of identity so much as the French do, or so much as I do now that I no longer live among people who speak it. The last two weeks of my Phonetics class have been centered around French pronunciation -- and only the French of France, without considering the speakers of Canada, Africa, or Belgium.
It's been pretty cool for me, as we've talked in terms of phonetic spellings that I can understand about the differences in regional French accents. That's how I realized that all of my friends are from various places and that I had yet to discern what the "Bordelais" accent really is. Most of the kids in my class are from some part of southern France, though, if not from Aquitaine, and they're all united in their scorn for the Parisian accent, which puts me in a kind of awkward place, as we're all taught Parisian French on the other side of the ocean. It has a theoretical vowel count of 16, whereas there are many fewer vowels in the south of France. It takes all the confusing minimal pairs away and replaces them with fewer and easier-to-make sounds (for me, anyway), so I think I may start trying to ignore what I was taught in my OU phonetics class and blend in with the crowd (that’s a theoretical crowd of Bordeaux-natives I have yet to meet, by the way).
If it’s easier AND I might go home sounding like I actually adapted, all the better, right? I mean, I’m sort of here to craft my own French identity, since I wasn’t born with one.
These days I'm meeting a lot of people who have a hard time understanding what I'm saying when I speak French, and a lot of Canadians and Brits who speak different English than I do. Combine those experiences with the fact that my classes are taught in French by professors with various accents (Congo, Naples) and mostly deal with the subject of linguistics? I've been thinking about it a lot more than I ever have.
Most of the anglophones I meet in this country immediately say "Oklahoma? Really? But you don't sound like you're from Oklahoma!" The American-inclined ones might add "Actually, you don't have an accent at all." Most of these people have never been anywhere near Oklahoma, though some of them are American (Californians, I'm looking at you).
It's true that I scorn the word "y'all" and try not to drop the g's off of my present participles, but I think I sound like most educated Oklahomans. The longer I'm away from there, the less alienated I feel from that place -- that is to say, the more I feel like it's a part of me, and the less annoyed about it I become. There are a lot of things I love about it. However, the backward politics is definitely not one of them.
But back to the subject of accents. I think I never identified with my maternal language as a source of identity so much as the French do, or so much as I do now that I no longer live among people who speak it. The last two weeks of my Phonetics class have been centered around French pronunciation -- and only the French of France, without considering the speakers of Canada, Africa, or Belgium.
It's been pretty cool for me, as we've talked in terms of phonetic spellings that I can understand about the differences in regional French accents. That's how I realized that all of my friends are from various places and that I had yet to discern what the "Bordelais" accent really is. Most of the kids in my class are from some part of southern France, though, if not from Aquitaine, and they're all united in their scorn for the Parisian accent, which puts me in a kind of awkward place, as we're all taught Parisian French on the other side of the ocean. It has a theoretical vowel count of 16, whereas there are many fewer vowels in the south of France. It takes all the confusing minimal pairs away and replaces them with fewer and easier-to-make sounds (for me, anyway), so I think I may start trying to ignore what I was taught in my OU phonetics class and blend in with the crowd (that’s a theoretical crowd of Bordeaux-natives I have yet to meet, by the way).
If it’s easier AND I might go home sounding like I actually adapted, all the better, right? I mean, I’m sort of here to craft my own French identity, since I wasn’t born with one.
Comments
Post a Comment