Catholic priest's advice to a fourteen-year-old girl

[chilipeppasbaby]

My character is a fourteen-year-old girl who migrated to Australia with her family from Singapore when she was six. Her family were Hindus way back when, but have been Catholic for generations. She attends a Catholic girls' high school, where she is bullied by other girls for being what they consider overly religious: volunteering to sing a hymn

Comments

[chilipeppasbaby]

She doesn't have a heavy accent by any means, just traces of an accent, that happen to show up more if she's around her family. The more racist kids at her school run with this and insist that she "talks weird." At one point, someone informs her that everyone makes fun of the way she talks behind her back. Exasperated, she says, "Still? For heaven's sakes, I came here when I was six. I've lost most of my accent since then. You'd think they'd try and find some new material."

I've had a few friends who migrated from India or Singapore when they were little, who speak with very thick Aussie accents but start to speak with a slight Indian accent when they're around their families.

The experience with accents is based a little on mine - I migrated from England to Australia at age four, and people who knew me at age nine, ten or eleven remark that I "talked like Oliver [Twist]." My older sister has a much thicker Australian accent than me, because was seven and was teased mercilessly by older kids for being English (she also had a rather bad speech impediment, which probably accelerated the teasing). When I started kindergarten in Australia about a year after we'd arrived, the other kids didn't know about accents and didn't think to tease or ostracise me because I talked differently. I didn't get teased about my English accent until I transferred to a new school when I was nine. My sister's accent changed much more quickly because she purposely adapted it to stop the teasing, whereas I took years. Even now that I'm in my twenties and most of my English accent has disappeared, I still get the odd person asking me whether I'm Irish or Canadian.

[melyanna]

It might be less a matter of an accent than peculiar phrases. I'm from the southern US but live in the north now. I have no trace of southern accent but there are still southern phrases that I use which, ten years after moving here, catch people off-guard.