| #4 A common enough occurrence. Shoot, I end up sounding like whomever I'm speaking with, if the conversation goes on long enough. My part of the country is the intersection of Northeast, Southeast and Midwest, so that is amusing enough, but when I've been conversing with Mr. Wife's colleagues from India, and when we lived abroad, the results have been startling. I've had quite a few compliments -- sometimes from Americans! -- on how well I speak the language for someone who didn't grow up speaking it. There was the time I'd spent the day tootling round Frankfurt with the English wife of a colleague, then had dinner with a young man who'd gone to my high school. His face was a picture throughout dinner, as we discovered old friends and old haunts in common, me sounding like the poshest of public school girls, he like a boy from the Rust Belt. Especially as he'd been in classes with one of my brothers, who most certainly never, ever sounded anything like how I did that day. |
