Accent learning and keeping it going.

[nachtebuch]

Hi everyone! So this might be a bit of a fun one. There's also a bit of storytelling so I've put everything under a cut. It's basically about my experience trying to pick up and internalise a new accent.

Comments

[naobot]

I don't have any stories of my own but am interested in responses here.

Also in regards to this:

P.S. I know there are people in the world who consider such accent-learning behaviour 'pretentious' or 'inauthentic', but the whole point of this post isn't to judge such matters. Please don't turn this post into something negative like that.

Your experiences may be motivated by a variety of reasons, but I think anyone who isn't a visible minority who speaks a possibly stigmatised variety of English should reserve their judgments because they don't understand what it's like.

[laudre]

My wife is a Singapore native, and her natural accent, when speaking English, is a slightly Singlish-tinged, mildly archaic British public school accent (her primary influences in spoken English were BBC media and her school English teacher, an elderly English expat woman whose accent was very much a posh RP). When she came here to the US, I was working at a call center, and so she applied for a job there. During her training period, one caller was very hostile to her (not an uncommon thing at a call center by any stretch), threatening to kill her (in an angry, hyperbolic way) and specifically calling her out as a foreigner stealing American jobs or something to that effect. After that, she felt very self-conscious about her accent, and her status as a visible minority, and started altering her speech and accent to sound more American and stand out less. She's by and large succeeded; there's only a few things (some slight differences in word use, speech rhythms, vowels), but it sounds like a regional variation, not an outside accent.

[nachtebuch]

I reckon 'slightly archaic' is actually a very frequent problem with speakers from ex-British colonies! Someone was very amused the other day when I used 'properly' as an intensifier, and he was saying that he knew people who were educated by Brits back in Hong Kong who were even more 'English' than I was, in the sense that they spoke really proper, posh BrE. On the other hand, this is a guy who listens to a lot of urban music, so it is entirely possible that he himself isn't used to speaking in that way, while others might be.

On that note, it sucks that your wife was prompted to awareness about her accent that way :/ Standing out less is partly the reason why I took this whole venture up, especially because I've really been interested in acting and being a visible minority is already a sort of barrier to the type of roles one can get.

Thanks for sharing this btw!

[laudre]

Oddly enough, my wife also is interested in theatre, but visible minority aside (although it's not necessarily an obstacle to roles here, depending on the local theatre scene), she also has anxiety disorder, so there's probably not a force on Earth that could get her acting on stage. Instead, she's far more interested in doing costumes and props; her university education is currently on a forced hiatus due to medical and logistical issues, but once we do get her back, she's hoping to continue her tech theatre minor. (She really loves costuming.)

[sayga]

I hated the comments I got when I moved from England to the US, so I lost my accent as quickly as possible. We'd moved to Texas, so my mom said it sounded as if we were from New Jersey for a while (I was 10 when we moved. My English accent was gone within a year or two). Plus, I couldn't bear it when other kids would say, "Oh you're from England? Say something in English!" I was too young and shy about my accent to have a witty response.

[sollersuk]

Agreed. I mostly tone down my South Wales accent (acquired from my mother, persisted despite all my childhood being in London) except when talking to family/close friends/someone else from South Wales - when I still worked in an office, I got comments that everybody in earshot knew when I was talking to the Land Registry office in South Wales.

When I was still teaching (in London), I had a colleague from Liverpool who retained his accent ferociously because he wanted to go for working class solidarity. I found him once in the staff room almost literally crying into his coffee because his class worked on the dichotomy of west London/posh, and therefore perceived him as talking posh...

[x_reggg]

My situation is pretty similar to yours! I was born in Hong Kong as well, but I moved to Australia when I was young and came back to Hong Kong when I was six. I learnt Australian English when I first acquired the language, but 12 years of British/International School and American dramas has made me sound American but say everything the British way (if that makes sense). Plus the fact my relatives and local friends didn't have good English, there are a few words that I say with a Chinese accent... I went to London for university as well, picked up a slight London and Northern accent (my bf is from the North East) and now I'm back in Hong Kong working with lots of Americans and a huge accent mess up! :P

[evilstorm]

Native Singaporean, grew up there but spent high school years in international schools, most recently lived in Australia for the past 6 years. I tell people I have a migratory accent--it changes depending on who I'm speaking too. I've had the same thing as you where Americans thought I sounded Brit (not remotely, to my ear), and Brits thought I sounded American (but my vowels are all Commonwealth!). I aimed to lose my Singaporean accent, but I never consciously learnt another one, just absorbed what was around me. Also, weirdly, I have regional quirks that I picked up out of books--I'll say "y'all", for instance--even though I never/rarely encountered it in meatspace.