Accents. Why do we have them? What good are they and are they worth protecting?
I don’t have official answers to these questions. I’ve never studied language formally in any way. When I meet someone from a different culture I always like to learn a word or two in their language. I always felt like as a Canadian I have a fairly neutral accent. Somewhere between Southern Twang and good old British. I guess we must all feel that way because our own accent seems normal to ourself.
An accent gives you a story. I recently moved to Ireland, where most people here have a beautiful thick Irish accent. And now I am the odd one out. As the guy with an accent, everyone wants to guess where I’m from. They want to hear about me and why I’m here.
I love talking to people who speak my own language but with an accent. From the fairly conservative Northwest accent of North America, to the thick southern drawl of the Southern States, to the completely different and beautiful accents of the British Isles, to the incredibly different twists of English in the Caribbean countries.
I also love trying to understand how English as a second language is affected by the speaker’s first language. I’ve had the pleasure of learning a little bit of Spanish, mostly from some time I spent in Nicaragua, in Central America. I learned what I know almost completely just through conversation, picking up more bit by bit. I surprised myself how quickly I picked things up naturally without the need to study formally in any way. But I started to see how if your ears are used to certain sounds, you’ll continue to use those sounds even when learning a new language. It can be hard to hear subtle differences between two completely different words that a native speaker would have no trouble with.
In my time learning Spanish and since, I began to notice subtle accent differences within that language. The people of Spain speak Spanish in an accent that is considered by the Latin-Americans to sound more refined or fancy in a way. Similar to how the British accent might sound to a Canadian or American. I once visited an incredibly remote area in the hills of Western Nicaragua and met some people who possibly had never talked to a native English speaker. They even had their own dialect of Spanish that was incredibly difficult for me to understand!
In this day of constant and instant connection, just from sitting on a couch we can be exposed to accents of people from all over the world. I believe there is something important and beautiful about preserving accents. What a shame it would be for everyone to just melt into the same form of speaking. Isn’t it a beautiful thing that wherever we go in the world we can represent our home just based on the way we speak?