Nuances of an Accent

This past Thursday, my parents and I drove up to Los Angeles to visit my sister in college. She was going to present her senior project to a committee of advisors and fellow students. Guests were welcome, so my family and I drove to see her. When we arrived, my sister was dressed in her sharpest suit. She looked very professional and confident. We sat down while her group rehearsed the last minute details of their speeches and refined the timing with their Power Point presentation. Her entire group consisted of fellow Asian students: a Chinese girl, Vietnamese guy, a Chinese girl raised in the Philippines and spoke with a Tagalog accent, and my sister the Filipina. 

While each member of my sister's group went up to present, their accents were noticeable, but the English was not difficult to understand. What I found most fascinating was my sister's speech--not the content of her presentation, but the way her voice sounded. Please excuse me while I go off on a tangent here, but my sister's presentation reminded me of an incident that happened approximately three years ago....

A friend of mine was driving me home, and while passing through the community that preceded my neighborhood, my friend asked me, "What are some good Filipino restaurants around here?" 

With excitement, I replied, "Oh, there are some good restaurants around here. If you go to that one, they have really good pancit. There's two shops on Eighth Street. One has really good lumpia, and the other sells baked goods like pan de sal, hopya, and --" 

"Stop it!" he sounded disgusted, but he was laughing. 

"What?" I didn't understand why he sounded so... "ugh." 

"You have an accent." 

"No, I don't. Do I?" The concept of me having an accent was impossible. 

"Yes. When you say Filipino words, like lumpia and pancit." He said the words without an accent, with elongated vowels and without the fluency of dipthongs. 

"Lumpia and pancit," I repeated. 

"You have an accent. Lumpia and pancit," he repeated as though I were to imitate him. 

"Lumpia and pancit," I repeated again. 

"See!" he exclaimed. 

I heard no difference, but he had. He said that there was a slight change of accent from English to Tagalog when I included foreign words in my speech. Since then, that incident has made me self-conscious of when I spoke. Not only that, I became more aware of accents--even amongst fluent English speakers. In the past years since that time, I've attuned myself to listen to the way people talk, and if I heard even the slightest difference in cadence, or even the way people talk in general, I ask where they are from. Most times I have been able to guess that they were not from California, or if they were from Northern California, from the east coast, or from the south. One time, I insisted that a co-worker had a southern accent. He told me was raised in Berkeley, in Northern California. I insisted that he had a southern accent or at least influenced by someone who spoke with a southern accent. He then revealed that his parents were from Georgia. 

Anyway... Now, back to my sister's presentation. My sister speaks perfect English. English was our first language growing up. In the house, with friends or family, English isn't spoken with an accent, not like a recent immigrant who arrived and has a noticeable thick accent. But when my sister stepped up the podium to present her section of the presentation, it was like listening to a different person. Her regular English appeared to turn up a notch to even straighter English. It was like professional English; she sounded like... a "white person." After she presented, she sat back down with her group. 

After all the presentations were finished, she came back to us and we talk a little about where to eat lunch. Her English went back down to the comfortable English... the English that is fading away from Tagalog influences, but never really was. Maybe the only thing that I heard was the difference between comfortable English used at home versus the professional English that is used in conference rooms. But it was like listening to someone who spoke with an accent suddenly erase it. 

Given that I live in a community with Spanish and Tagalog speakers, whenever I say foreign words, I naturally switch to their respective accents. I always thought that language was unique because of its sound. When another friend said that I had a beautiful accent when I tried to learn Japanese, I was flattered. I'll never be a native speaker of any foreign language, but I want to at least sound like one.