Accent?

[redbird]

In the course of buying cheese today, we were chatting with the salesperson, and I mentioned being from New York City. He asked why, then, I had an English accent. *blink*?

Another stranger (same kind of context) has asked if I was British, because he thought I had such an accent, since we moved to Bellevue. (I know there isn't one British accent, but that's what the guy said.) I've had people wonder that a time or two before, but not twice in as many months. I know I don't have a strong/stereotypical New York accent (though I do speak quickly), but "you don't sound like a New Yorker" and "you sound British" are very different statements.

The guy today said he had lived in New York for a year, a while back, while attending City University of New York, but when I asked "which part of CUNY?" gave me a blank look, as if he'd never heard the term "CUNY" before, and said he couldn't remember when I clarified that I meant which of the colleges that make up the City University, only that he had been studying business.

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Huh. Sounds like Baruch College, the business "unit." (Although one can take business courses at any CUNY college.) If it was sufficiently long ago, he probably expunged it from memory.

[ellarien]

Perception of accents can be odd sometimes. I kept my (northern-standard) British accent pretty much unmodified through my years in Arizona, and it usually only took about three words for people to peg me as not-American, but they couldn't always spot what I actually was; I was once accused of sounding Belgian.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Well, your mother lives in London. Why shouldn't you have an English accent? *grin*

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I'm beginning to think that what people mean by that is "uses correct grammer and multiple clauses" - saying someone sounds 'English' or 'British' as a proxy for 'educated'. It's weird.

-Nameseeker

[redbird]

That may well be part of it; I got a slightly more formal/grammatical English from my mother, perhaps because it's not her first language, though it's the only one she's entirely fluent in.

But the question/assumption is going on at weird levels, because the people who ask that seem both to actually want to know where I'm from, and to be a little surprised at the answer. (Out here I'm just saying "New York"; when I was living in the city I might say things like "I was born and raised in Queens.")

[negativeq.livejournal.com]

Over the years people have asked me about my "British" accent. I grew up in Queens.

Perhaps Queens has two accents - "The Nanny" and "Faux-Brit"?