The other day my boss Rolando, a Salvadoran who’s worked for Peace Corps for 15 years, told me, “Your Spanish is excellent; in most groups there are a couple of volunteers who leave the country with virtually no accent, and I think you might be one of them.” Well shoot, that oughta show me there’s been no need to kick myself so much for never studying new verbs or reading books in Spanish. Although I still feel as if I’ve barely just hopped into the kiddie pool of fluency, and there’s still a whole ocean waiting for me, so I don’t think I’m over the self-flagellation for not studying yet.
But what Rolando went on to say interested me more: “It’s obvious you’ve been talking a lot with your community members, but what surprises me is that your accent is not a country accent.” We went on to talk about Meghan, a volunteer from my group, whose accent has become very strong—a Salvadoran equivalent of a backwoods eastern Tennessee accent, in my mind. She aspirates all her S’s, skips syllables, turns silent H’s and some unlucky consonants into G’s, and uses countrified little sayings. It’s almost shocking to hear such a strong accent coming out of a white girl’s mouth. It’s pretty cool, too.
Rolando was curious about how my accent has become excellent in such a different way—a sort of generic urban Spanish—and it got me to thinking about learning styles. Meghan must be more of an imitative learner, saying what she hears. I think my learning process is more convoluted. I can’t remember a word for the life of me unless I can envision how it’s spelled. If I learn a new word from someone with a strong country accent I repeat it back according to how I imagine it’s spelled, until I have it right. Then the image of the letters is there, burned into my brain and beginning to associate itself with the way the word feels to say. Luckily orthography is predictable in Spanish; I think learning English as a second language would give me more problems because of the lack of spelling standards.
I think my mind’s-eye dependence on spelling is part of what makes for a more urban, generic accent. Pronunciation in Spanish is even more predictable than orthography, and knowing the rules lets you know how to pronounce anything ‘correctly.’ So I do. But my generic accent also derives in part from a conscious avoidance of some of the more obvious distortions of Spanish as it’s spoken in the Salvadoran countryside. The biggest example is the slew of incorrect stem changes in verbs like aprender—people where I live conjugate it as apriende instead of the correct aprende. I like some of the common country verbs, like apiar instead of bajar to describe getting off a bus, because it’s fun to speak the local dialect and surprise a few people. But incorrect stem changes just take it too far in my book. With an eye to speaking Spanish in other parts of the world, I don’t want to sound like a total hick.
…but I realize I’m sounding like a huge square right now! I guess that’s part of it too—most other volunteers probably aren’t as predisposed to think very much about stem-changing verbs. The price of nerddom.
The day after Rolando’s compliments I got more, from someone who’s self-conscious about her own accent. This was a visitor from the States, a teenager we’ll call Nu Kiks because of her taste for shoes. She’s the niece of my friend Noé, in for a weeklong visit from Long Island. Her last visit here was three years ago, and it’s clear she’s not entirely sure what to do with herself in rural El Salvador.
I was in Noé’s store in town talking smack with him about the U.S.-El Salvador World Cup qualifying match next month. I was a little curious about the silent dark-eyed girl behind the counter with him, whom I’d never seen, but just assumed she was a friend or neighbor. After a round of good-spirited jibes about a game whose conclusion is pretty much foregone (ha! take that!) Noé and I moved on to joking about other things. I said I wanted to buy some honey, pointing to a bottle of whiskey for sale on the counter and asking faux-naively, “is that honey for sale?” The dark-eyed girl finally piped up, saying “it’s ALcohol” in a very North American accent, surprising the hell out of me. We expressed our confusion to each other.
“ALcohol! That was a surprise, hearing such an American accent!”
“You didn’t actually think I was from here, did you? I thought I looked different, or dressed different.”
“No, you definitely look like you could be from here,” I said, wondering whether she’d take it as an insult.
“Well, you confused me too. I was sitting here thinking, well, he doesn’t look Spanish, but he sounds like he is.”
“Thanks. Where are you from, anyway, someone who says ALcohol like that?”
It turned out Nu Kiks was not at all silent by nature. She grabbed at the chance to talk in English, and jawed my ear off for about an hour. She talked about how boring it is here (“There’s nothing to do! There’s electricity, and that’s about it”), race relations in her high school (“I’ll hang out with anyone, but I mostly stick to Spanish people. And Indians, but mainly the ones who look Spanish. I thought my friend Adid was Dominican for months!”), the latest fashion out of Queens (“Maybe you don’t know about it yet, down here, but it’s all about skinny jeans, Jordans, and tight T-shirts. All the white boys in the school are trying to do it, and I just think, please, just be white”), the one attractive guy she’d seen in El Salvador (“He knew how to match! And he didn’t look Salvadoran at all, more like a Colombian-Dominican mix. But wouldn’t you know it, he was the only one with a girlfriend”), how gossipy the people are here (“and I thought I talked a lot, but these people! They talk about every little thing! You can’t do anything here without your mom hearing about it! By the way, do you know about the crazy lady who lives down the block there? Supposedly she lured so-and-so’s husband away from her….”), and wanting to hike here (“I’ve been telling my mom, I want to go mountain-climbing, but she says we’re going to the beach this weekend, and I guess I feel bad my grandma couldn’t go anyway…”). And on and on. It was fun to listen to.
When someone asked Nu Kiks something in Spanish she answered, then turned back to me and told me she’s embarrassed of her accent so she tries not to speak too much Spanish. She thinks people make fun of it. It’s true, her accent didn’t sound Salvadoran, but it seemed more South American than gringo. I pointed this out, and it seemed to relieve her. She explained her three best friends are Colombian, so that’s where the South American sound comes from. I told her not to worry about being made fun of—it’s natural to sound different after spending a lifetime in the States, and the people who matter won’t mind, etc. etc.
She began asking me if it wasn’t hard to live here, saying a Puerto Rican friend of hers had found moving back to Puerto Rico for a year very hard. People had made fun of him for being a gringo. Well, I said, I don’t think I face the same issues of identity. I am a gringo, you see, plain and simple. I think it’s a lot easier for me, not being caught up between worlds like immigrants and children of immigrants. I told her to read Dreams from My Father and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the two books I’ve read recently that speak most to those identity issues. If she actually does read Oscar Wao I don’t know how much she’ll like it; she’s not much of a nerd.
