Accent

I have a strange accent. I mostly think of it as just the way I talk, but once in a while, it makes me ponder where it comes from.

Well, the answer is simple: it comes from my environment. But that’s neither here nor there.

When I was small (and still living in Korea), we lived in Seoul, so I assumed that we had a straight-on city accent. I assumed this until college, when my spoken Korea cracked up some of the newer Korean immigrants. They found it cute and didn’t make me feel bad about it or anything, but speaking with them made it clear that HOLY CRAP, I SPEAK LIKE A HICK! Ahem. Pardon my yelling. It was pretty shocking.

I learned my first bits of English while attending school in Queens for two years, and learned to say, “Mira!” when I wanted a friend to pay attention to what I was saying, what “pendejo” and “puta” meant, at the same time as I learned the Pledge of Allegiance with my stumbling accent. Frankly, at the time, I had no idea I was hearing two different languages. Being younger helped to get the pronunciations much more quickly than my sister or my brother did, but it was still strange at first.

Then we moved to Philly. I don’t know if you’ve heard people with strong Philly accents, but I couldn’t help but pick up on that in the many, many years that I lived there. So I rather thought I had a Philly-Korean accent. I assumed this until I visited my family in Atlanta sometime after college, when I heard the Korean-Americans who live in Atlanta speak English & Korean. I spoke mostly like them, but not. I expected them to have a strong Georgian accent, but nope! They sounded more like the people I knew up in Philly than other people in Atlanta.

And when I went to Korea, people knew instantly that I spoke Korean with an American accent; I couldn’t quite get some of the sounds right and I don’t know how to properly end a sentence (but that’s more of a grammar issue really).

So maybe it’s a Korean-American accent — not the one that belongs to older immigrants that is easily mocked on shitty nail parlor sketches on MadTV *glares* *boycotts* — that is acquired by kids who speak Korean with their families but American English with everyone else. There seems to be a greater commonality in sound due to that than regional accents.

At the same time, when I see my Philly friends, after a couple of hours, I hear my speech altering considerably to pull in more Philly sounds. So that must mean I have acquired somewhat of a Californian accent. But if you ask me, I have no idea what a CA accent sounds like (I’m not counting common phrases, but an actual difference in how words are pronounced); I just know it sounds different from the familiar tones of my Philly pals.

I once knew a guy who insisted to me that museum was pronounced “mew-zay-uhm” (rhymes with “dayum” [sic]) and tried to correct my “mew-zee-(u)m” pronunciation. It was such a bizarre way to say it for me.

Anyway, I’m totally lost. 😀