Voices
I get infected with interest in this stuff as soon as I get to a British Airways check-in queue. I start listening and classifying, and watching others do it faster than me. Words and accent peg you here, and they’ll always piss someone off. If you’re uncomfortable being having your origins and aspirations dissected, try an Irish accent. Thug? Posh totty? Only Dublin knows for sure. - Dervala
Accents are the most curious thing. I continue to find it amazing that there is such diversity in the relatively small land mass of the U.K. America has its own variety and classification and it is not subtle - I had a friend once who kept talking about "Americans" and I thought of it as ignorant; the basics of "American" are there, yes, but there are differences. Just listen.
I've got my own lilt - I know. Mine is a hodge podge - bastardized by travel, assimilation and reaction. There are some things I've stuck with just because I like the syntax. I borrow, from my Canadian friends, the following:
"I'll phone you" as opposed to "call you."
My friend Emily from Vancouver used to say that, maybe it just reminds me of her. My South Dakotan coworkers have given me a hard time over my aversion for contractions. I might say:
"Would it not be easier to ..." or "Do you not want ..."
People do react to accents. I learned this as a young boy in Nairobi - the Indian shopkeepers would initially find my presence annoying until they heard me talk, dripping with America, and their eyes would turn into cash registers in an instant. I began to do it for sport. Or not do it, just to remain an annoyance.
Now I use my accent to disarm people. It's not that I look like Snoop but I often get the intuition that saying something in a good, understandable Euro American speech will open the door for conversation. On my way back to South Dakota, stuck in the hotel shuttle with all the blowhard businessmen on their way (or so they LOUDLY said) to Aspen it was useful to at least dispose of preconceived notions. When one blowhard asked me what I did I said in my most Oregonian of accents that I was a software developer consulting out of Orange County, CA. I can blowhard too...
Disarmament is also critical when meeting parents. You get my drift.
It might be easy to forget my real voice amidst all this language hacking but it’s nice to get around old friends or my brother. The mixes of Nairobi, California and Mario Brothers gel together into my undressed language.
Your lilt?
9:39:17 AM 
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