Posted:
I've been in the States for almost a year, and among the various interesting and odd things I've witnessed and experienced, by far the one which throws me the most is when Americans appear astonished when I tell them I'm Indian. I suppose a couple of decades ago, my brown skin would've clued people up to the fact, but as America - and the world in general - becomes increasingly more multiracial and multicultural, skin colour alone doesn't determine where one hails from.
I haven't done what many Indians do when they move to the West - modify my cadence. I went to school in Bangalore - incidentally, the same one a certain famous Bollywood star attended - but I sound NOTHING like her, nor do I sound like a typical Madrasi, despite being a Tamilian through and through.
'But you sound SO very European' * is one of the constant things I've grown almost tired of hearing. 'I thought you were from England' is something which I hear less commonly than being told I sound European, but I've heard it a plethora of times nonetheless.
Which is very, very odd, because to me I sound perfectly Indian. All right, so I pronounce schedule as SHED-JOOL and not SKED-JOOL or SKED-YOOL, and mandatory as MAN-DA-TRI rather than MAN-DA-TORY, and don't pronounce words like produce as PRO-DOOS or news as NOOS, but then again that's how I've ALWAYS pronounced those words. And the thing is, as often as not, when people remark about my accent, I'm NOT using words which have discrepancies in pronunciations.
Which in turn begs the question - what really IS the Indian accent, or rather, what's the accent most Westerners associate with Indians? There are just SO MANY Indian accents, each inflected with various regional dialectal brogues and lilts and patios that it becomes hard to anoint any particular one as the quintessential Indian one. Hell, in my own family, my Malayali cousins sound nothing like my Gujarati ones, and neither of them certainly sounds like me or my sister.
*How I wish! How I wish I sounded Scottish or Irish. They are seriously two of the most sexiest accents in the world - especially when the speaker also happens to be a young(ish), super hot male a la James McAvoy 😳
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