So umm, do I want my kid to get my accent?
NOBODY TOLD ME ABOUT THIS
The funny thing about having a funny accent is that you don’t even realize you have one until you go out into the world. And even after you go out in the world you don’t think much about strangers mentioning your accent until you realize that at least once a week somebody says something like I don’t understand your accent — where are you from?
In the places I’ve lived — DC and now Los Angeles, we’re all from somewhere. Nobody you meet in the capital is from the capital. We came from other places and brought our ideas and our accents. There are the crisp, moneyed accents belonging to the grown children of the New England prep schools. There are the sticky-southern accents and the whistling accents from the wide-open skies of the flyover states. On a good night, you can stand in a bar in Washington DC and hear the whole country talking around you.
I think a lot about accents. Or, I used to. When I was a reporter on Capitol Hill, I thought constantly about accents. The Capitol exists as a microcosm of the nation — lawmakers and aides are sent to Washington from every scrap of land in America. And if you spend all-day-every-day around them, listening to congressmen and senators answer the same boring-but-necessary questions (what did you think of Trump’s tweet/speech/meltdown), you begin noticing the accents.1
But after I moved away from Washington, I stopped thinking about all those different ways-of-speaking. Until I had a child who began to speak. And as stupid as it sounds, I began to worry that I was passing down my way-of-speaking to my son.
I have a noticeable accent that thickens after A.) a few beers or B.) a few hours around my own people. By my own people, I mean people from the Eastern Shore, that peninsula wedged between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. The accent is vaguely southern and distinctly muddy. And mine is noticeably thicker because for the past 300 years, my family lived on a series of isolated islands along the Maryland and Virginia coast. All that time in isolation thickened the accents. An example: our island is called Hoopers Island. We pronounce it Huppers Auwnt.2
This accent, my accent, evokes the notion that the person carrying it is illiterate, slow, dim-witted.3 Once, after I did a mid-day appearance on MSNBC, people on Twitter thought I was stoned because I talk so slowly. That was an actual thing people were tweeting about my hit: how high is this guy?
I eventually stopped going on TV and stopped caring what people said about me on the internet. But those vanities and concerns were replaced by the parade of terrors-and-wonders that make up parenthood. And though I mostly feel alright about this new place I’ve found myself, I’m quietly afraid of passing my accent down to my son. Should I be worried that he will one day take this accent to school where he will pronounce “underlying” as “underline” or “alternate” as “ultimate” — and then some bullying will follow. And I’ll have to divine that nonexistent line between telling my son not to start fights and telling my son he’s allowed to punch the occasional bully.
I am well aware that in the grand theater of parenthood, passing off your accent to your kid sits at the bottom of the list of concerns. You just hope he comes out with ten fingers and ten toes, right? And sure, yeah, me too. I’m more grateful than worried. But I do still worry.
When they handed me a baby at the hospital, all they told me was not to give him honey for the first year. The nurse on duty skipped any forecasting of the day-to-day tasks — teaching him not to scream on airplanes, managing screen time, teaching social media literacy and making him aware of, you know, fentanyl and mass shooters. But those terrors are easily definable. There are hundreds, thousands of Axios-style listicles on how to leap those hurdles. I haven’t been able to find any online research (outside of Reddit) answering the question how do I keep my kid from sounding like he just crawled out of the mud?
Of course, you can fix your accent. I know people who have done it. In fact, that’s the whole basis of Henry Higgins’ relationship with Eliza Dolittle. That old asshole Henry Higgins was so confident that he could change Eliza’s accent (and therefore, society’s perception of her) that he went around singing why can’t the English learn to speak?
But I haven’t fixed my accent. I haven’t learned to speak. And now I’m trying to teach another human how to speak! How?! What do I do? Go around constantly in character, talking like Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant? Is that how it works?4
I suppose maybe this inane worry about passing off my accent is a stand-in for something more substantial. Maybe it’s a stand-in for that universal and undefinable worry that troubles every clueless parent. I’ve read that some parents obsess over the things they can’t control — these are the sort who become “helicopter parents.” I’ve read that there are simply different types of parents and some of them worry more than others. But parenthood is unfortunate in that there are so many research papers and convincing blogs about it that you can surf the web until you build a narrative that makes you feel as though everything is going to be just fine.
And again, there aren’t any reasonable blogs about how to not pass down an accent. This troubled me for a day or two until I narrowed the rationale for the insufficient search results down to two explanations — either A.) I’m the only one worrying about this or B.) it really isn’t going to be a problem at all — certainly not enough for an entire 995-word blog post.
I’m going with B.
I will admit that unfortunately, most members of Congress don’t carry the heavy, more characteristic dialects of their districts because most members of Congress have been wealthy for their entire lives. They didn’t grow up in the rut of the American middle or lower classes where the populations have stood stagnant for half a century and the accents have thickened.
This sounds like bullshit, but it’s an actual thing. The island is basically a poor man’s Martha’s Vineyard. The BBC did a good story on Tangier Island, which is just nearby.
I hated my accent when I first went off to college and it suddenly became a thing. And I thought it made me sound illiterate, slow, dim-witted. But then, during my sophomore year, I read The Secret History and got all obsessed with Donna Tartt and her incredible Mississippi accent. She doesn’t seem to have it as much anymore but during that ‘92 Charlie Rose interview, she's got this thick accent and you just watch her and think hey, this woman is fucking brilliant.
Maybe that is how it works. Some American parents have claimed that their children have developed British accents because they watch so much of the British cartoon, Peppa Pig. According to The Guardian, this is called the “Peppa Effect.”