by Samir Chopra
Like every human being on this planet, I speak with an accent. In my case, I speak the English language with a hybrid, mongrelized Indian variant that bears the impress of thirty years spent on the US East Coast—in New York City and New Jersey—with a two year stint in Australia in between. It is distinct and unmistakable and clear in its lilt and inflection; no American, listening to me, will think I have grown up in the US. My ‘looks’—perhaps vaguely Hispanic, Middle-Eastern, or Southern European—might confuse some Americans about my ethnic and national origins; they receive instant confirmation, once I begin speaking, that I’m some kind of ‘foreigner.’ The way I speak makes clear I’m from ‘elsewhere:’ I mix up my ‘W’s and ‘V’s, occasionally inducing double takes in bartenders when I specified vodka-based cocktails during my drinking days; I do not always pronounce vowels in the clipped and muddied style so distinctive of American English; I emphasize syllables in my own idiosyncratic way. Sometimes, when I travel in Europe, locals peg me as ‘American’ because they have picked up on an Americanism or an acquired American twang in my speech—they, for their part, seem to think I have an ‘American accent.’ Because the Indian accent has intonation patterns similar to that of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh accents, I’ve sometimes been asked—in the US—why as a brown man, I’m speaking in a brogue. (In the opening scenes of the 1990s British crime film, Twin Town, the Lewis brothers, from Swansea, Wales, are shown talking to their mother; their conversation is only partially audible but from the up-and-down sing-song intonations, I could have sworn I was listening to Indians.) Sometimes American listeners will insist I have a ‘British’ accent because I’m Indian, because India was an English colony and I attended so-called ‘English medium public schools,’ the Indian equivalent to the English or American private school. And so it goes.
The partial Americanization of my accent has been a subtle process; I have not been conscious of it being molded and shaped as I spoke English in the US. Instead, as I have participated in conversations, my spoken English has, in a kind of sympathetic dance, aligned itself with that of the speaker’s. My wife points out that when I converse with a good French friend, I start throwing around Gallic shrugs by the dozen; and when I lived in Australia, I picked up, quite quickly, many distinct Australianisms, and delighted in deploying them in my speech to my Australian friends (especially when it came to matters of shared interest like cricket). When I speak to Indians visiting the US from India, they make note of how impressed they are by the fact that I still comfortably trade in street-level colloquialisms in my conversations in Hindi/Urdu. I have, in a way, retained my Indian accent in my Indian languages; some Indians tell me I speak Hindi/Urdu with a Delhi accent; some Pakistanis assure me I speak Punjabi with a Pakistani accent. I do not belong anywhere; my accents give me away. My accent reflects my mixed-up nature, part Indian, part American, part migrant, part itinerant wanderer, part stable resident.
Because I speak English with an accent, it is a common enough suggestion—often made to my face, in all kinds of social settings, professional or personal, formal or informal—that English is not my ‘first language’, that rather, it is my ‘second language.’ But English is my first language in every relevant dimension; I speak, read, think, and write better in English than any other language.
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