Contagious Accents

Sometimes I don't realize I have an accent.  I grew up in Central Virginia, but assimilated pretty well when I lived in Chicago for two summers, so I got a little Midwestern.  Then I lived in Louisiana for a year, where I settled into a deeper Southern accent, but I thought that a few years in Northern Virginia had neutralized me a bit.

I was wrong.

I have had Siri on my phone for over a year now and I never use it because she can't understand a word I'm saying.  When I ask her to call my husband, Aaron, she offers to look things up on the internet.  When I enunciate, I hear this twang come out and I throw the phone across the room in horror.  Siri's dumb anyway.  I don't REALLY have an accent.

If I have an accent, it would rub off on my kids, and they would say things in some random dialect that I've picked up and they wouldn't know where it came from.  Can't be having that.  Plus, since we're a military family, we'll be moving all over the place and my kids need a Newsanchor Neutral accent so everyone can understand them.

I had a close call years ago, when my Little Man was born.  Aaron's mom brought it to my attention.  She hails from Pennsylvania and spent years moving with the military before settling in Virginia, so she's the source of Aaron's pretty neutral accent peppered with what I think are Pennsylvania-isms (ex: The laundry "needs washed."  Who skips the "to be" that should be in there?  I think it's Pennsylvanians).  I have a notably stronger accent than Aaron, but it doesn't take much.

Anyway, Sebastian was like six months old and Aaron's mom mentioned that the women in her aerobics class asked how the "Little May-un" was doing.  My eye sockets expanded so fast I had to catch my eyes before they popped out.  She immediately looked embarrassed, but I laughed.  I knew exactly where it came from - my brain already had a montage ready of me cooing a six-syllable "man" at my child for this moment when I realized I was passing on some serious Southernness to this innocent baby.  I fretted about it for months, and successfully reduced my term of endearment from 4-6 syllables to a comfortable 2-3.

Fortunately, Sebastian's babysitter was a Mexican woman who had previously lived in London, so when he started talking and somehow picked up the term "Oh Man," the word came out kind of surfer-Californian - and thankfully, only one syllable.  I celebrated and forgot all about accent modification, figuring that if I kept my children around enough other people - especially Aaron - they would be immune.

Then last week, Sebastian asked me which car we were taking: the green one or the "vay-un."  The next day, he lectured Audrey about dragging her blanket on the "gray-ound."  The final straw was when, through his four-year-old speech impediment, I heard him ask for Ironman fruit snacks, with an empathic "Eye-oon MAY-un!"

Maybe Audrey - whose speech patterns deserve their own homage - has somehow been saved?  No.  She might sing the "Spiderman" theme song as "Spi-Mahn," with that same surfer-style single syllable that Sebastian used to use, but if you ask her to open her Eye-oon Mahn fruit snacks by herself, she'll tell you sadly that she "tay-un't."

These poor innocent children...

AFTERWORDS: After finishing this post, I heard myself asking Aaron if I could read it to him, when he gets a "chay-unce."