The Pleasure of Accents

My Mother at 25

My mother came to the United States from England at the age of 16, and for the next 80 years, her English accent remained intact, perhaps becoming even stronger in old age. I think she was always nostalgic for the Manchester of her youth, where she excelled at many sports and was worshipped for her skills by the other girls at school.

Or maybe her delightfully crisp way of talking was simply an immutable part of who she was. Perhaps by sixteen how we pronounce words is fixed, and efforts to change are largely futile.

I was very close to my mother, so I, too, developed something of an English accent, hitting my “t’s” more emphatically than most New Yorkers and separating my words with greater precision. In New York, I’m sometime asked if I’m from England, but when I visit California, everyone knows I’m from Back East!

You never hear your own accent (until you are recorded). Most of us think we have no accent, although we think everybody else has one!

I grew up in Greenwich Village, with its many tourists, so I grew up hearing and enjoying  accented English. Today, there are many French people in my Westchester town, and hearing them speak English is always a delight. Sometimes I’ll speak to them in French, because between the ages of three and five, I lived in Paris, so I acquired the phonemes naturally. To this day, I sound good in French, my accent far better than my comprehension and expression. Because I have the right accent, I like to visit French countries.

When we came back from France and I was five, I complained to my mother that English sounded “watery.” I suppose I missed the French guttural sounds, the depth of the French “n,” the curl of the French “r.” Perhaps today I like accented English because a foreign accent adds thickness and flavor to our “watery” language. An accent makes English more colorful, whether the accent is Arabic or Italian or German.

Yes, German. Growing up, I heard German accents only in movies about World War II, with Nazis barking out commands. But since then, I’ve met a number of German people and I find their English, especially that of the women, gentle and musical.

An accent of one sort or another is often a class signifier within your country, but when you go abroad, it becomes insignificant and you are simply a person from that country. I had an English boyfriend with a working-class Cockney accent. When he came to New York, his class disappeared and he was simply a Brit. That is the promise of travel.

When she was young and single, my cousin Jackie dated only guys with accents. She hung out in the cafes and folk clubs of Greenwich Village, and for years she was with one foreigner or another. When he was in town, sometimes she was with Mal Evans, the road manager for the Beatles. Her serious boyfriends were an Irishman, an Israeli, and a Croat. At one point, she filled out a match-making form (this was long before online dating) and was asked what was the single attribute a guy must have. She replied, “He must have an accent!”

I asked why. “It’s important for a man to have a beautiful voice, and an accent is part of it.”

What is it about an accent? Why does it give ordinary speech a special charge? Does an accent suggest the mysterious unknown? When we’re attracted to a person with a foreign accent, are we just slaves to evolution, unconsciously aiming to strengthen the species by mating outside our tribe—even if we’re past reproductive age?

Or are we just intrigued by novelty, the thrill of the exotic?