Why Are Accents So Important To Us?
It is the destiny of every language learner to become obsessed with accents at one point or another. Why? For one, a strong accent in a foreign language is often a source of embarrassment, a signal you have not learned the language well enough.1 The reframe I like to this problem? Give yourself credit for having the determination to try in the first place. “Do you know what a foreign accent is?” says lawyer and writer Amy Chua, “It's a sign of bravery.” On top of that, native speakers of a language often perceive a marked accent as attractive in an exotic sense, or just plain cute. Although for sure, sometimes they will be turned off from it.
In any case, as someone who did not take speaking Spanish seriously until college, and is unlikely to spend years living in a Spanish-speaking country, I’m more or less condemned to always have an accent in the language. But I actively work to make it less and less noticeable.
Moreover, a native Spanish speaker recently told me something encouraging—they said that if they didn’t know me, while they would know I’m not a native Spanish speaker, they would not know where I am from. It’s not a dead giveaway that I’m American. I’ll take that. Additionally, there have also been times when people thought Spanish was a language I grew up knowing. However, most of the time, the people who think that are not native Spanish speakers, so it is not as flattering as it would be if they were.
While proper pronunciation is a crucial aspect of linguistic competency, you can still have an accent and be fluent. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger. And while I have an advanced Spanish level—I believe C1, pending the results of the exam I recently took from Instituto Cervantes—I still get my tongue twisted the wrong way sometimes when saying something in Spanish.2
It was the process of language acquisition that made me more interested in accents in general, and the role they play in society and relationships. Here, I am now particularly thinking about accents within the same language.
My brain broke the first time I considered what is now beyond obvious: there is no such thing as not having an accent. It is all relative and depends on your perspective. If you grew up in Louisiana in the early 1900s and never left the state, your first time hearing someone from New York speak would shock you, and he too would wonder why you speak in such a strange way.
So with that in mind, I wanted to explore some questions. What even is an accent, and why are they so important to us? What type of signals do they send? What do they say about who we are?