American English - Not the Real English?

By Babin Dinda

"Really, you are from India, but you don’t have an Indian accent!” This statement has revisited me on different occasions in different settings. The food we consume in our daily diet and the clothes we choose forecast our cultural practices and ethnicity. Likewise, the way we converse also can be a determining factor of our cultural background.

We, humans, have developed a psychological reset to categorize individuals based on linguistic pronunciation. We can easily determine a persons origin by the way one speaks a common language,e.g., English and the way we spell ‘color,’ but what happens when we have mingling of two cultures over a period of time? As time advances, we see the embodiment of the exposed culture, which may be different from the origin of the individual.

I have had the opportunity of growing up withmultiple cultures and interact with different identities.From a very young age, I was exposed to a specificlinguistic style. However, I was unaware of this entiredilemma until my eighth-grade Parent-Teachers

Meeting (PTM). At this monumental event (of my life) my mother was approached by my English teacher with an interesting complaint against me. I was accused of regular usage of “slangs.”

When asked to elaborate on this matter, my teacher stated that I had an “American Accent” and I should resort to British English as it is the correct form of the language. Studying in a British school and living in a country dominated by the British education system, this was a serious allegation.

Fast forwarding my life to Orientation for International Students at an American University, I was introduced to a group of graduate students with a similar origin to mine. As conversations rolled up, I was once again defending another interesting but a similar crime as previously. My accuser joked (with a mocking tome), “It hasn’t even been over a day and you already have an ‘American Accent.’”

These events have led me to question my links to my origin. Does growing up in a Third Culture lifestyle distance us from our origins? When do we pick up a specific accent and is this consensual or by accident?

Linguistically we, Third Culture Kids, are a unique cluster. The accent we acquire is not only a contribution of the cultural setting of our juvenile but a homogeneous blend of multiple influences. However, I can certainly assure that these developments are by no means consensual. The acceptance and incorporation of a specific linguistic behavior is purely by accident.

www.CultursMag.com | Spring 2019 19