How global accents work
I had a chat the other day with a my best friend. I’ve known her since she was 10 and I, 8. I have a handful of long time constants in my world and she is one of them. So, it would be fair to say and assume that 13 years of practice would make me very, very familiar with her voice, intonations, pronunciations, rhythms of sentences, when her voice breaks with emotion and reverberates with joy and pauses for breath. So I thought too.
When I hopped on our monthly call, I though I was pretty confident and knew what to expect.
“Ooh I like the dutch coming out.”
She said, ashamed- “If you noticed it, it must be very obvious”
Now, this small exchange is interesting for a couple of reasons.
A)- Both she and I have a few similarities now, in that, most parts of our language sounds like different things to different people.
We have what I like to call “global accents”, wherein, the english language we speak can’t be placed on a map.
For instance, in my case, I sound British-Indian on most days. Most other days I sound Australian. And sometimes, I get the occassional - “you sound Irish today, what’s up?”.
That’s the quirk and superpower of a polyglots and/or migrants. They unconsciously adapt their tongue to the environment they’re in, and the language and culture they choose to love. But most people don’t know this and sometimes global accenteers themselves.
And new global accenteers, will go through the initial phase where once they realise that their tongue has evolved, shame will motivate them to do everything to resist that evolution.
and B)- It taught me about qualities I had that I share with other global accenteers. Like being pedantic about words I am dead-right certain I have the correct pronunciation for, and over-apologising for butchering words that I mispronounce like “itinerary”.
Look, although this specific post relates mostly to migrants and polyglots today, I suspect that people of the world tomorrow (more like a couple of decades, I mean) will have accents that you will no longer be able to box into countries. And the chaos of that won’t be too bad as you might think it is.
Is that too soon to say? I don’t know we’ll see.