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Speaking with an accent
I knew I had made it as a speaker of English as a second language when a fellow traveler in the Zurich airport, stuck there with me waiting for the fog to lift, identified me as an American. True, this happened because he, like me, wasn't a native speaker of American English, and hence, did not pick up on my foreign accent. Regardless, I was proud, in Professor Higgins's words, of having (almost) conquered "the majesty and grandeur of the English language." I recently discovered the fun Speech Accent Archive of George Mason University, where you can explore different foreign accents in English, from those owned by the speakers of Afrikaans to those of Zulu. So, when I speak American English, I should sound something like this. My p's, t's and k's tend to lack the puff of air at the end, just like Eliza Doolittle's did; my ee's and oo's, and ay's and ow's are much shorter then they need to be and a bit cut off at the end; my and's sound more like end's; and a good portion of my ng's have g's at the end. This leaves out an occasional v that passes for w, and all those d's that slip in for th's. This explains in part why I felt right at home--Dose were da days--when I started living in New York. Plenty of native New Yorkers don't bother with th's either and famously pronounce their g's when they talk about their relatives who live in Long Island. Interestingly, some of the features that make the New York speak what it is are actually due to the influence of languages brought into the Big Apple by different waves of immigrants. Check out this fun site if you need to be convinced that the (in)famous New York accent is still well and alive. Naturally, a foreign accent is due to the influence of our native language, which acts as a kind of filter, helping us deal with the unfamiliar sounds of the second language. When we hear a speech sound that is foreign to us, we typically fail to perceive its distinctiveness, and automatically liken it to the closest sound in our native language. We then pronounce it that way as well, hence, the accent. Our regional accent acts in much the same way, as the movie My Fair Lady showed in such a hilarious way. We have thankfully become much more aware of and tolerant toward accents, both foreign and regional, since the era of Henry Higgins's big phonetic bet, or even the time of the making of Cukor's movie. Still, you might want to know that accents can often be shaken off or reduced, although, not without some frustration and lots of practice. [ZVIEZDANA]
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