(More than) A few thoughts on… accents.

Accents have always puzzled and intrigued me. I’ve always thought it was interesting how something as simple as they way in which we use our language can not only reveal a lot about who we are but where we are from and even our socio-economic status. It’s often been said that in Britain accents are so finely tuned that people could tell where the speaker was from just based on how they spoke, this also revealed (or maybe just made general assumptions) about a person’s level of education or what class they belonged to.

In Italy they have somewhat of the same thing, but instead it’s based on different dialects in the country. In Rome they have Roman, here in Veneto they have their own as well and it works it’s way around the country. It’s all based on the Italian language but how it is used differs in different regions, so much so that others may not be able to understand each other. I have also found that many don’t even speak real Italian but just that of their dialect. This also makes it hard for me because I’m trying to learn real Italian but have problems understanding others a lot of the time. For those wondering (I know we had this discussion before I left), it is in the Tuscan region, that the ‘real’ Italian is spoken.

I bring all this up because not only because accents have been a source of amazement here in Italy but also because the anthro-geek in me thinks that this would be a good study (although I’m sure many of this nature have been done, in fact I think I should have paid more attention during linguistic-anthro because we did indeed study this). What I think set me wondering was that accents that I found indiscernible were blatantly obvious to others. I found this out last week when I was at my English course in Verona. As I mentioned previously there were some American’s there with us, we were all around the same age and fresh out of university. One girl was from Seattle, another from California, another from Florida and a guy from Georgia. To us, we all had similar accents, with the exception of the guy from Georgia, who may have had a slight southern tinge to his voice, but not as heavy as one might expect. I was talking to the girl from Florida one of the days and a guy also at the course approached us, he was from Germany and was there as a teacher of both English and German. He interrupted us and said to the other girl that her accent was like music to his ears, that she probably had one of the most beautiful accents he had ever heard. I was puzzled. Not only because I wanted to know what was wrong with my accent, but I couldn’t tell the difference between our speech. Granted there are some of the more slight nuances between an American and Canadian speaker, such as the stereotypical eh and the different pronunciations of certain words, or the minor difference in the pronunciation of the o-sound, but to either of us, the difference didn’t seem that apparent. After asking him about it, apparently he had noticed a large difference between all our accents, something that we couldn’t notice no matter how hard we tried.

It seems that unless there is an obvious difference between the different accents, such as the thick southern accent of the US, or the Boston or Chicago accents (to name a few) it’s almost impossible to find these differences, yet for others the differences are large. Evidently a Canadian accent exists and it’s not as musical or beautiful as the Florida accent.

I also bring up this whole accent thing because it also surprised me how one’s accent can change or remain the same. One of the head teachers at the school got up to speak at one point and continued to teach us some part of the lesson for about half an hour. In all honestly what he was trying to teach us was lost on me and apparently my American counterparts faced this same problem. You see, he was American, or so we assumed, he had an American name (Eric) as well as his last name and we were so focused on figuring out his accent that we couldn’t concentrate. When he first spoke he sounded American, but as he continued his sentences would always end with this weird accent. It was no longer American but this amalgamation of British, American and some other thing we couldn’t quite place, quite possibly it was just the intonation of someone who was confused between their British and American self (he indeed sounded as if he had a case of the “Madonnas”). Afterwards the other girls approached him to see where he was from, turns out he was born and raised in the US, but came to Italy about 8 years ago and uses both Italian and English to communicate.

In contrast, I thought of my aunt. She was born in Italy, but came to Canada at a young age and learned English. She then moved back to Italy many years ago and generally uses Italian to communicate during the day, although with me here she probably uses English much more now. What is interesting is that she has no confusion of accent, when she speaks English, it’s the same Canadian accent she’s always had. I can only assume that when she speaks Italian, her accent is Italian. When I asked her about this she had no explanation, which is what I expected, because how would one consciously know about a change in accent?

It’s all just so interesting (to me at least). How our accents can be so much part of our identity and such a cause for confusion at the same time.

So what am I getting at? I’m not sure, but I had all these thoughts on accents that confused me and I wanted to write about one of the more serious differences that I have been wondering about lately rather than my normal mindless nonsense about the difference between coke and coke light.