Children of the British Isles

Ian and I have a similar circumstance: people think we're "foreign."

Most people "get" that we're American, but there is a subset of people who think we're from somewhere else. In my case, people who question my Americanness usually think I'm from Ireland. Maybe I have what sounds like a residual brogue, like what you'd find among Irish immigrants who came here 20 or 30 years ago. Of course, I've only been to Ireland once, and briefly, so I have no such excuse.

In Ian's case, some people think he might be English. I think it's because of two things: first, admittedly, a small and temporary speech impediment. He has a hard time biting down on his "R's" in that super-American way; they're more rounded and genteel, like Billy Crystal's "You look mawvelous." When I took him to a birthday party last year, the father very gently asked me, "By the way, is Ian English?" This "issue" is being worked on right now - although I'm not convinced that such work is needed... But in the interim, he has R's that would be more "at home" on the other side of the Atlantic.

The other factor, in Ian's perceived "angloglot" speech, is his overall tonal patterns. Ian speaks poetically, lyrically, almost musically, and I think the crests and valleys of his sentence-topography probably make people think he's from somewhere where tone is delivered more like an oboe than a car-horn.

But in any case, Ian's pseudo-Englishness has caught up with him, and he tried to broach the subject with me last night.

When he asked me why people think he's English, I paused, trying to figure out where to go from there, but he volunteered an answer to his own question:

"Because of your weird accent, which, even though it's unpopular, I happen to like?"

I'm quite that none of that was intended pejoratively. "Weird," for Ian, means "unusual" rather than "whack-job." And unpopular (I later investigated his understanding of the term) means more uncommon than something nobody would like. And I think he meant that he likes my "accent."

And maybe he's onto something. Maybe my faux-brogue gene morphed into faux-Oxford for him...

(Ian, February 27, 2012)