I Love My Accent, Here's Why
I live in a house of five girls, and it is wonderful. It is my first home away from that of my parents, and I am privileged to be surrounded by the best of friends. Our similarities abundant, we fill our home with varying international backgrounds; five different corners of the world, under one roof, co-existing as best we know how. And I would say we do it quite well.
Our biggest differences lie accentually. As we speak to one another, our pronunciation of the same words is categorically different. Accents amalgamate; we pick up on each other’s semantics, and depart cultural and linguistic norms to formulate our own way of speaking. An accent exclusive to the five of us, undoubtedly featuring influences from the other people we interact with in our daily lives.
It is quite special—an accent that is representative of our friendship and its roots. I am able to appreciate its natural production now. But ten-year old me, moving across the world from Bombay to New Jersey could not fathom being different. I was embarrassed by the accent that set me apart from everyone else. I forced myself to absorb the American accent, let it eat any part of my culture I carried on my tongue. At school, I sounded like every other student. At home, I spoke how I was most comfortable. I laughed comfortably, cried comfortably, allowing myself to be completely free. At ten, it felt like a survival tactic. At nineteen, I now understand it better. I am less embarrassed of myself and the form of internalised racism that I adopted, because it was something I felt necessary in order to be understood.
Our accents are a combination of foreign linguistic influence, social class, geographic exposure, and the people we surround ourselves by. These phonological differences are not exclusive to the way we speak the English language, but the ways in which we organise our sentences. There are dialectal differences to the language, ones that I can spot much better now as an Indian woman in the United Kingdom.
English is a language given to us by the British, but we speak it in our own way. Television doesn’t fail to highlight these differences: The Simpsons Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, voiced by American Actor Hank Azaria, has an exaggerated Indian accent. It is a joke now. Even for us Indians, mocking each other’s regional accents is funny. Until we are in a room, full of universally acclaimed “unaccented” people, and we sound different, and someone mocks us, or laughs at us, or ignores something we’ve said.
Linguists have made it clear, ‘unaccented’ people do not exist. Everyone, everywhere, speaks a variation–in other words dialect–of the language. There is a purely linguistic side in understanding accentual variation. Our experiences today are far more global than they were, even just ten years ago. We must not underestimate the power of our ways of speaking. They are reflective of the journeys we have undertaken, and those that came before us. They are the product of what makes us, us.
I am often complimented on my “international school” accent. It is a result of my travels, constantly remoulding itself to be best suited in any conversation. I have taught myself to speak in a way that renders me understood. But I still carry my culture in my voice. As soon as I am with my family, or at an Indian restaurant, or even in India, the desi twang slips into my tone. Elsewhere, I allow my tongue to guide me freely. I speak however I feel like, no pressures prevail.
I love my accent. I love how it changes, I love its malleability, and I love my comfort in its uniqueness. But most of all, I love that it has no finality. As it moulds, and remoulds, goes back to it’s original form, then to a new one, I will accept it because it is a culmination of who I am, and it deserves to be heard.