Where Did I Get My Accent From?
March 30th, 2010

Sean Ward rapThere is one question that almost everyone asks me when they meet me.

“Where is your accent from?”

People make wild guesses as to where my accent is from.

Frequent guesses:

  • Brooklyn
  • England
  • the Canadian East Coast
  • the Southern U.S.
  • South Africa.

Some people have even insinuated (or declared outright) that it’s a fake accent, a put-on.

The truth is that I don’t know where my ‘accent’ comes from, it’s just the way I speak.  I once had a Linguistics Professor from the University of Toronto explain to me that what I have is an idiolect – a fully-formed dialect spoken by only one person.

I have tried to guess at where my manner of speaking evolved from.  The best that I have been able to figure out is a combination of a couple of factors:

ONE

When I was in my early teens, adults in my life were always telling me “slow down!  I can’t understand a word you’re saying!”  A friend even played an answering machine message back to me in which I was speaking so quickly that even I couldn’t understand a single word I had said.

TWO

As a teenager, I listened to almost nothing but rap and hip hop.  I was kind of snobby about it, as teenagers can be, thinking that my music was the only music worth listening to.  A childhood friend with whom I would stay over weekends and March Break was part of a crew that had a lot of buzz at the time so I had a connection to all the hot underground shit.  The high school I attended at the time was predominantly upper-middle-class white kids who liked Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and I was the riff raff fuckin’ up the scene.

Anyways, these factors have combined to produce a drawl in my speech as I enunciate and make my words round in a way that most people aren’t used to hearing.

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  • http://www.negativesmart.com/ Candice

    But, the guessed accents listed above sound COMPLETELY different from one another!

    You should submit to this website: http://web.ku.edu/~idea/, or in any case, post an MP3 of you reading this text that was specifically designed to analyze pronunciation: http://web.ku.edu/~idea/readings/comma.htm (since they say they want to collect TYPICAL regional accents!) Because I want to guess, too!

    My accent, at the moment, is a mixture of southern Ontario/Toronto plus northern Indiana plus Chicago plus probably a bit of Calgary, and I'm not really fond of it. I like going back to Toronto (or even Calgary, though I *hate* how they sound their short A's) because I lose some of the icky drawl for a while.

  • http://www.seanward.net Sean Ward

    different accents: I know! That's why I think the whole thing is crazy!

    I totally want to submit to that website. Maybe they have some insights into that wacky speech situation I've got going on.

    I have a copy of the speech that was prepared for Richard Nixon to give on TV in the event that the first Apollo Moon mission was unsuccessful and the astronauts didn't make it back to earth. We should each read it and compare & contrast.

  • tuckermike

    I get the “where you from?” thing too from my fellow Tennesseeins. I tend to link it to exposure to TV. however people from northern states, etc can hear my southern way I pronounce words.
    (A side note, when I know I have to get an order from a resturant or directions at a place I know is going to be more rural, I have to lay on the “country”, or I know they won't understand me.)

  • http://www.negativesmart.com/ Candice

    I'm down (depressing piece of writing, that, though) … I have no idea what I sound like anymore. The only time I've recently allowed a computer to record my voice, I was slightly (maybe more than slightly) buzzed on Chatroulette. My mom complains about my “drawl” (I don't hear it). My husband laughs at me when an occasional remnant of Canada pops up (“been” with a long e instead of “bin”, for example). “Aboat” and “eh” have been ridiculed out of me for the most part.

  • http://www.seanward.net Sean Ward

    Yeah, perhaps we should think of something a little more upbeat to compare voices with.

    I do the big middle on words – hOWse, for example, as opposed to hoose. I do Been instead of bin. I also relish my Ts where most of the time they're dropped by people.

  • http://www.seanward.net Sean Ward

    Lay on the country! that's my policy!

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