By Daniele Iannarone
I’d like to take you all to Vietnam. More specifically the beautiful tropical island of Phu Quoc, in the south of the country, where I spent my last week of a backpacking trip throughout Southeast Asia. As per usual, I was getting to know other travellers, and we were all talking about where we were from. “Britain;” answered one girl. “Australia;” “Netherlands;” “Korea.”
“Canada!” I told them.
“Canada, no way!” People were shocked. One girl’s jaw even dropped. “There’s no way you’re a native English speaker, you sound like a European who just learned English very well.”
Throughout all of my travels, this conversation was something I’d become accustomed to. While English is my predominant language, the language I use for school, work and the majority of social interactions with friends and family, apparently my particular accent still makes it appear as though I am not a native speaker.
Perhaps this is due to my particular upbringing. Being raised in an Italian family in Montreal, I certainly picked up some traits of the Italian-Montreal accent that had been discussed in class on Sept. 25th by myself and Conner, as well as presented by Dr. Riches via the video “Talking Canadian,” a CBC Documentary, although my Italian-Montreal accent is certainly more subtle compared to others here in the city.
Yet my accent is probably even more diverse than that. I spoke only Italian until around the age of 5, at which point I attended an English elementary school, but a French immersion program until the end of grade 3. I was perfectly trilingual at the time in terms of fluency.
Later in life, I started learning Spanish. I was fascinated by this language, as I have family living in Mexico. I studied languages in CEGEP at Dawson College, specializing in oral and written Italian and Spanish, and later applied to spend a year studying abroad in Spain while in university. My Spanish fluency quickly matched that of Italian and French, and I was able to use all three languages socially and academically, however with English still presiding as predominant.
So how does my accent sound? Do I sound like a native speaker? Does this really matter? And do I want to change it to sound less “foreign” and more “neutral”?
Here’s the thing. I don’t, really. The way I speak is a reflection of who I am and the various experiences that have shaped my current identity. I am a proud Montrealer, from an Italian background, with a clear fascination and interest in various cultures, particularly Latin-based ones in Southern Europe and Latin America (I am even trying to learn Portuguese!). If someone makes a comment about my accent, for me it is nothing less than a conversation starter.
I would like to take a moment to relate this to one of our most recent lessons about accents, and more specifically to the text by Eckert entitled “The Three Waves of Social Mobility” (2012). In this text, Eckert discusses that, for certain individuals language variation not only marks social categories, but also builds a speaker’s identity when the speaker accepts or rejects different types of linguistic variation. Interestingly, my unique way of speaking is a reflection of my experiences, yet is not something I can actively control. I am accepting the fact that I may not be seen as a native speaker by many people, yet I will move forward recognizing my proficiency and ability to communicate with a variety of people from around the world.
Of course, with all of this being said, I do try and speak as “neutrally” as possible when teaching ESL, however I have never been told by any of my students that they don’t understand what I say.
I’d be curious to hear about the way you speak. Do you speak with a “standard” accent in your native language? What have people told you, and how has this caused you to try and “mask” your accent at times – if you even mask it?
For those of you who have heard me speaking English, do you think I sound like a native speaker, or do you agree with my fellow travellers that I sound like a speaker of another language who has just learned English very well?
References:
Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(June), 87–100. https://www-annualreviews-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/doi/pdf/10.1146%2Fannurev-anthro-092611-145828
