It’s all in the inflection.
As most American’s know, one can probably guess where a person is from, or at least a general area, by listening to their accent. Southern, western, midwestern, New England, and the like. More often than not, folks from northern and central Florida tend to have southern accents. And yet, I have no accent to speak of. I’ve straight up been asked where my accent was when talking with guests. If I have one, I can’t hear it. Often, I hear my coworkers from the central Florida area with a similar quirk. I’ll chalk it up to Orlando being an insulating influence. My parents don’t really have accents either. As they were growing up, they never really stayed in one place long enough to develop any particular speech pattern. I suppose when I get really going or riled up, or when I’m talking about tomatoes, I’ll slip into a southern accent, but it’s not very noticeable. (Ya’ll)
But I can easily identify other accents. I meet people from all over the nation on a daily basis, and the range of speech patterns is enormous. I wish I could post the video that led to this next discovery. Unfortunately it has some strong language, mostly out of excitement and not avarice, and I’d like to keep this space clean. K was in stitches, and when he stopped laughing to breathe, I asked him if this was a video from Massachusetts. He looked at me and said, “How did you know?” And thus it was discovered that K can’t recognize, or even hear, the variations in American speech. I’ve experienced this in the reverse as well. Being from Korea, K has been teaching me about its history, and the very strained and unusual relationship between the North and the South. I’ve learned that both regions have their own accents, probably as different as a Southern vs. a New England accent, and their own vernacular. My own Korean language skills are laughable, and I can’t really say much beyond asking for milk and telling people how many cats we have. But K loves to show me Korean films, and I’ll follow along with subtitles. Recently, we watched a film that featured characters from both North and South Korea. (Joint Security Area, if anyone’s curious. Be warned though, it features mature content. Still a fantastic film.) I couldn’t detect a single difference in their speech patterns, try as I might. I brushed it off, chalking it up to my inexperience with the language. So discovering this morning that K couldn’t detect the accents was a bit of an eye opener for me. He’s lived in the US for nearly ten years, and even after that, he couldn’t hear a very different speech pattern. One of those things I never really thought about, until I was looking at it, I guess.