Accents can be distinctive; clear giveaways to which country, city, even region someone belongs to. That is, those accents that haven't forgotten who they are, tried to dress themselves up to cover up their origins, started unconsciously parroting local ones or been reduced to comical imitations of other accents.
Mine falls in the the latter category but it's not simply playing temporary dress up, or imitating someone else or camouflaging its owner's true identity by chameleon-like blending in with its surroundings. It's all of those, all at the same time, sometimes in the same conversation. Pronunciations are murdered, cadence is a patchwork job and comprehension is the most frequent victim. Some accents' owners can switch between two accents, simply shrugging off one and putting on another; no confusion, no stray lapses into the other accent. I would like to say mine is like a patchwork quilt but then in that each patch is separate, adding adding a distinctive character to the quilt resulting in a pleasing overall effect. The one I have is more akin to the victim in "Murder on the Orient Express" - murdered by several hands who all think they were justified and leaving nothing but a mess behind.
One day it will all be Indian but out of nowhere in a few words or sentences the 'r' becomes a rhotic one, then catches itself and pulls back into a neutral English one that is so prized in India but an instant later realizes Indian English is also mostly rhotic. So one word starts out in an Indian accent, rolls through what it thinks is a generic American one, abandons it midway and finishes up in affected tones of a colonel from the British Raj.
Then there are some words which I have been pronouncing wrong all my life attributing it to accent differences - like 'metabolism' or 'adolescent'. It may be that I was saying those with an Indian English accent because everyone around me was pronouncing it in the uniquely Indian way of 'meta-ball-ism' and 'a-doll-es-cent'. But it doesn't make it any less confusing.
I try to reason myself out of the guilt of having a fickle accent. English is my second language after all. But I was schooled in English so I should have a consistent and solid Indian accent which is mostly a neutral English accent tempered with red chillies & cumin. Well but I did watch a lot of American TV shows, I tell myself. The only thing that resulted from that was you started saying 'trashcan' instead of 'dustbin', 'iron' instead of 'press', 'counterclockwise' instead of 'anticlockwise' and 'apartment' instead of 'flat' because the American words were cooler than the ones your parents and grandparents used - my brain chides me.
Then I went to college in Canada and my friends howled with laughter at my put on Canadian accent. To the ever polite locals there my accent was chiefly Indian lapsing into momentary imitations of a Canadian one. The purpose was to make myself more comprehensible and the result was exactly the opposite. This continued after I came back to the motherland where suddenly my accent would start behaving as if it belonged to a bad actor auditioning for a role in a Canadian movie.
Eventually it wore off but the twang would creep back when talking to friends from college or more embarrassingly for no reason whatsoever. Even worse, in an attempt to wipe all traces of it, the accent turned into a half-assed BBC one. I can't even bring myself to be pretentious enough and put on a bad American accent while in America and switch back to my regular one when talking to Indians and when in India. The 'aa' refuses to become 'ay' and betrays me by words like 'last' and 'bath', 'master' and 'can't'; the 'p' and 't' remain unaspirated giving rise to the unfortunate situation where people think my name is 'Booja'.
So here I am, with an omnishambles accent which cannot decide from one sentence to another as to where it's from, living in the US since the past two years and I moved to Texas a year ago. Now not only do I have a regional accent carrying out guerrilla raids on my existing one I also have to deal with the fact that quantities of people think my name is 'Pooha'.
Y'all see what I have to deal with?
Mine falls in the the latter category but it's not simply playing temporary dress up, or imitating someone else or camouflaging its owner's true identity by chameleon-like blending in with its surroundings. It's all of those, all at the same time, sometimes in the same conversation. Pronunciations are murdered, cadence is a patchwork job and comprehension is the most frequent victim. Some accents' owners can switch between two accents, simply shrugging off one and putting on another; no confusion, no stray lapses into the other accent. I would like to say mine is like a patchwork quilt but then in that each patch is separate, adding adding a distinctive character to the quilt resulting in a pleasing overall effect. The one I have is more akin to the victim in "Murder on the Orient Express" - murdered by several hands who all think they were justified and leaving nothing but a mess behind.
One day it will all be Indian but out of nowhere in a few words or sentences the 'r' becomes a rhotic one, then catches itself and pulls back into a neutral English one that is so prized in India but an instant later realizes Indian English is also mostly rhotic. So one word starts out in an Indian accent, rolls through what it thinks is a generic American one, abandons it midway and finishes up in affected tones of a colonel from the British Raj.
Then there are some words which I have been pronouncing wrong all my life attributing it to accent differences - like 'metabolism' or 'adolescent'. It may be that I was saying those with an Indian English accent because everyone around me was pronouncing it in the uniquely Indian way of 'meta-ball-ism' and 'a-doll-es-cent'. But it doesn't make it any less confusing.
I try to reason myself out of the guilt of having a fickle accent. English is my second language after all. But I was schooled in English so I should have a consistent and solid Indian accent which is mostly a neutral English accent tempered with red chillies & cumin. Well but I did watch a lot of American TV shows, I tell myself. The only thing that resulted from that was you started saying 'trashcan' instead of 'dustbin', 'iron' instead of 'press', 'counterclockwise' instead of 'anticlockwise' and 'apartment' instead of 'flat' because the American words were cooler than the ones your parents and grandparents used - my brain chides me.
Then I went to college in Canada and my friends howled with laughter at my put on Canadian accent. To the ever polite locals there my accent was chiefly Indian lapsing into momentary imitations of a Canadian one. The purpose was to make myself more comprehensible and the result was exactly the opposite. This continued after I came back to the motherland where suddenly my accent would start behaving as if it belonged to a bad actor auditioning for a role in a Canadian movie.
Eventually it wore off but the twang would creep back when talking to friends from college or more embarrassingly for no reason whatsoever. Even worse, in an attempt to wipe all traces of it, the accent turned into a half-assed BBC one. I can't even bring myself to be pretentious enough and put on a bad American accent while in America and switch back to my regular one when talking to Indians and when in India. The 'aa' refuses to become 'ay' and betrays me by words like 'last' and 'bath', 'master' and 'can't'; the 'p' and 't' remain unaspirated giving rise to the unfortunate situation where people think my name is 'Booja'.
So here I am, with an omnishambles accent which cannot decide from one sentence to another as to where it's from, living in the US since the past two years and I moved to Texas a year ago. Now not only do I have a regional accent carrying out guerrilla raids on my existing one I also have to deal with the fact that quantities of people think my name is 'Pooha'.
Y'all see what I have to deal with?
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