Revisiting this reflection as a senior:
I originally wrote this reflection after the class presentation on Accents in Children’s Media in the GEM Introductory Seminar. I was intrigued because the topic fell within the realm of subjects that interested me, but about which I still had more to learn.. I can see how my knowledge actively grew during this discussion; my dissection of the nuances of positive and negative British accent connotations seemed like an advancement in my understanding, as compared to my preexisting understanding of “accents associated with marginalized communities are looked down on, and other accents are seen positively, and that’s not fair.” The coexistence of the idealization of a “cool” accent such as the “posh and sophisticated” British one with a general connotation of “foreigner” as “untrustworthy” was a developing idea for me at that point. Thinking about it now, I would probably want to expand that idea to exoticism in general– certain accents being seen as “unusual” and “other” which can doubly lead to intrigue (like people finding French as well as British accents attractive) and distrust (the concept of “people from other countries are different from me, I can’t really know what to expect from them.”) The exoticism tied to accents increases and morphs as the country and the American popular narrative of that country changes.
Another thing that’s interesting to me looking back is my own experiences being perceived as “having an accent.” Obviously, everyone has an accent, but in the American environment I was raised in, my accent happens to sound like the one arbitrarily regarded as a “neutral American” accent, and therefore isn’t something I think about much when I’m here. However, I thought a lot more about the experience of “having an accent” after going to Spain, and what different accents mean in different contexts. In Spain, U.S. accents are associated by some with a certain idea of an obnoxious American tourist. In terms of “villainous” accents, this accent aligns with a different kind of “untrustworthy” — the American tourists whose demand for Airbnbs drives housing shortages, raise prices when they move to Spain as “digital nomads” on American salaries, and make no attempt to understand or respect Spanish social norms. While accents come with one connotation or another regardless of place, the range of positives and negatives attached changes with the context of a given language community’s (whether a whole country, or a smaller vernacular within one) relationships to other language communities.
Featured photo: The character “Scar” from Disney’s “The Lion King.”
