Re: CHAT: Being taken for a furriner ...

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>Similar but different:  when I was in England, long long ago, I was having
>tea in the hotel lounge and fell into conversation with the lady at the next
>table.  After a while she asked where I was from, and was surprised to learn
>I was American.  "I thought you were from the North..." Maybe "the North" is
>Brit-speak for "you talk funny ~not like me"....?  But I was rather
>flattered.  In those days I was fresh out of fancy boarding school and
>Harvard, where I'd adjusted my midwestern twang to the upper-class Eastern
>speech of my classmates (dropping r's, frinstance), and suffering from
>severe Anglophilia.
>
>After a year and a half in Georgia and S.Carolina with the Army, friends
>claimed I'd picked up a Southern accent.  Cringe.
>
>"I am so easily assimilated".
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That seems like a very good thing to me... for one, being noticed as
foreign gets tiresome very quickly... when I went to florida people kept
saying "You have such a posh accent!". Well, truth be told, I don't
think they'd recognise a true upper class english accent if they heard
it, they just associate a normal (southern especially) English accent
with posh.
 Another thing is, if it carries over into foreign languages, then again
you can socialize with the natives without constantly being interrogated
about where you're from. Whenever I speak in any foreign language, I
always get "are you english?" or something similar back... I think its
my pronounciation of r's (I have real difficulty.. its not a matter of
being unwilling, I try really hard... but the only non-English r I can
do is the french uvular one, because I heard a lot of French as a
child), and my tendency to aspirate unvoiced stops that gives me away
lol. But never mind... I always enjoy learning languages, and its better
to try than sit there in silence looking like an idiot. :) You should
really consider yourself lucky that you so easily pick up local
pronounciations.