Life in another language

Literary Review, Fall, 2003 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Human beings are extremely sensitive to the manner in which their language is spoken. In my old New York neighorhood, I was surrounded by an exciting array of accents--Italian, Greek, Yiddish, Hispanic, Irish, German, not to mention the variety of American patterns. Today Americans seem truly to wish to embrace the multicultural basis of their society; in those days, we were less kind--even to our fellow whitebread citizens. Americans from anywhere outside the New York metropolitan area spoke, we were convinced, "like hicks." Bostonians sounded stupid because they said "ruf" instead of "roof," "ca" instead of "car." Upstate New Yorkers rolled their rs--or perhaps it was just that they pronounced them--and we didn't like that either. And southerners and westerners--fu-ged-aboud-id! Of course, I've tried it on my travels in the states, too; I remember a Michigan sergeant in the army who cracked up everytime I said "water"--warda--and a kid in Stockton, California who used to visit me just to hear me say the word "dog." "Ha! Dawg!"

When my Danish wife visited New York the first time, the occasional American would guffaw in her face for a mispronounced word amidst her otherwise impeccable English. Once because she had pronounced the word "mayonnaise" as "myonnaise," another time because she pronounced the y in "syringe" as a long i. The latter case involved a relative of mine with a PhD in science who, when she mouthed that long i, leered at her as though he'd just seen her naked. And it occurred to me how edgily parochial and fear-driven is the compulsion to pronounce words "correctly" and to recoil from or pounce upon those ignorant of the "preferred" sound, who thus exhibit their "otherness"; as though saying "sighringe" instead of "suhringe" had stripped away the deceptive garment of my wife's excellent English so my provincial cousin finally clearly saw the nakedly subversive, half-commie Dane she really was.

At Dulles airport last year I chatted with a young woman who asked where my accent was from; I told her New York via Copenhagen and asked about hers. "We don't hay-ave accents whare Ah was born 'n bred," she solemnly informed me.

There is a brilliant scene in the 1980 remake of the film, The Postman Always Rings Twice in which Frank Chambers (Jack Nicholson) conforms to his Greek boss's mispronunciation of the word "neon"; the establishment decides how we are to pronounce things, and the establishment is whoever owns the joint and administers the food and money. Hearing someone say "De Good Nyews Bout Jedus Christ Wa Luke Write" might be amusing or worse to the provincial ear, but delightful to those who recognize it as the official Gullah Sea Island Creole translation of "The Gospel According to Luke," in which Luke tell wa dis Book taak bout.

Secretly I loved the variety of accents that abounded in my childhood. I loved the way the parents of one of my Puerto Rican friends would add an 'e' before any initial s--"The United E-states."--and sounded an initial v as b ("Bery good!"). After school for a while I worked for a Greek shoemaker who pronounced rubber as woba and gloves as golves; I lived for the times he would ask me to bring him his "woba golves." And I admired the manners of the Latins whose casa was always your casa and were, despite the stereotype of the Latin temper, in fact much slower to anger than my Irish friends, some of whom took any form of address as provocation: