A few days ago somebody online asked if people think I have an accent

[conuly]

This is a fairly common thing for autistics to have, a sort of developmental foreign accent syndrome, and I've got it too. (So, I think, does my mother, but she has an alternate explanation. Well, whatever the origin, she also is afflicted by people asking where she's from.) Interestingly, the further I get from NYC, the less people are likely to hear some strangely unidentifiable foreign accent in my speech.

Anyway, it's been a while since this came up in real life, but what do you know, just yesterday one of the people at the doctor's office asked when I was there with my mother!

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Comments

[conuly]

That's been my conclusion.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

There's this to consider, though: unlike her parents who grew up on both coasts and lived in the Midwest for years before she was born, my daughter grew up in the farthest corner of the Pacific Northwest, the Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas: we could drive to every house she ever lived in, in order, in a single day. (When people ask where she's from, she says 'Seattle', and she was actually born in the city, but she never lived there till she was grown, and to the Peninsula, Seattle is "Across the Water", the long urban scar that's got little we rural folk much want, or necessarily even condone, except jobs for our youth.)

So: in Seattle she was sometimes asked if she was British. People have been asking me if I'm British since I first moved from California to New Jersey when I was 9, BUT I don't think anyone who was British has ever asked me that. After 10 years in Ohio, I moved to Washington, and the thing I noticed about my own accent, in comparison to the native-born kindergartners I was teaching, was how much Ohio Appalachian I'd picked up. To myself, I still sound more Midwestern than anything else, but there's a huge difference between Ohio Appalachian and Nebraskan Germanic, the dialect with which both my parents grew up. Long story short: not British. But the East Coast seemed to think I was.

When my daughter went to London, she was asked numerous times if she was Irish. She actually is one-quarter Irish, but she only even met that side of the family twice during her childhood, so they didn't influence her speech. She colors her hair auburn, and I grant she looks like she could be Irish, but to my ear, her accent is 100% American, and at least 80% Pacific Northwest.

So, WTF?!? She didn't think any of the people who asked her were Irish themselves. In recent years I've had several people ask me if I'm Australian, but it might be just because I was wearing my mother's old hoodie that she got in Sydney. Who knows, right? Sheesh; hoomans.