on accents « Letters from Grenada

on accents

I’m always amused when I hear someone make a definitive declaration regarding his or her lack of accent. Or, even funnier, statements such as “there is no such thing as a British accent”. Because of course you do and of course there is.

I can understand how, for example, a person from England might bristle at the suggestion that he or she sounds just like a person from Ireland or Scotland. And vice versa. But I’m from New York, which sounds – to my ear – nothing like Boston, or Maine, or California, or Louisiana or Texas. And you don’t hear me insisting that there’s no such thing as an American accent, now do you?

Accents are relative. If I’m in Europe or the Caribbean, I have an American accent. But such a statement no longer applies when I’m in the United States. Then my accent is New York. Unless I’m in New York with other New Yorkers and then I don’t have an accent.

I don’t have an accent. Until YOU think I do, and then I do.

Savvy?

In Grenada I got mistaken over and over and over again for English. And sometimes Canadian. But almost always English.

Which is holy wow hilarious if you’ve ever heard me speak. My voice is 111% New York suburbanese.

One day Bean’s father and I were watching Pirates of the Caribbean and I asked him if he really, honestly seriously thought I sounded like Kiera Knightly.

“Oh yes, babes,” he said. “Allyuh does sound exactly de same to me.”

The other side of that coin is that when I first moved to the Caribbean a Grenadian’s speech was, to my ear, indistinguishable from that of a Jamaican, a Bajan, a Trini or even a Bahamian.

Two years later there was no way I’d mistake someone from any other island for a Grenadian, and I was actually offended when an American employee of Air Jamaica expected me to agree with him when he declared that all West Indians have a Jamaican accent.

I wanted to tell him that if he was expecting me to share in his white-people-know-everything moment he’d chosen unwisely. But he still had my passport in his hand so I just smiled and said nothing.