the "pretentious" accent
Sunday, October 04, 2009 (9:14 PM)
for a long time, i've been so disturbed by fake american accents of singaporeans that i didn't realise it didn't make much sense for my irrationale feeling. even those who sound natural and whom i happen to know didn't use to speak that way gets on my nerves.
but this trip to thailand got me thinking about accents in a whole new light. as much as the highly distinguishable fake-ness of the american accent still shakes me up every now and then, i've begun to find them more forgivable. and in fact, i feel that it should be encouraged. we should encourage the "correct" accents.
being in the academics of linguistics for a number of years now, i've been brainwashed into supporting the local flavour of english and the accent that comes with it. "there's no such thing as the "correct" accent!" yea right...
the incorrectness of the singlish grammatical structure is of no importance in this entry. but i've begun to seriously consider picking up the accent. american or british. whatsoever. i won't be using the "pretentious" accent to speak to my fellow singaporeans for sure. but i may try to speak that way when i deal with foreigners. americans or brits no less.
why?
if you think of yourself taking up a foreign language, like japanese, spanish, thai or whatsoever, somewhere in the back of your mind, you will (knowingly or unknowingly) make the effort to try to speak like the native speakers. because that's when language learning arrives at its peak. if by listening alone, my interlocuters are unable to tell that i am not a japanese when i speak their language, i have succeeded. the same goes for spanish, thai, korean etc. we don't want to speak japanese sounding like a singaporean. neither do we want to speak spanish like an asian. we want to speak like the spaniards and thai like the thais. so why doesn't the same go for english?
why?
as for the mandarin accent, i can't bring myself to speak like the beijingers. sorry...