Katie Brandenburg
The Independent
ASHLAND —
There was a time when there was nothing I wanted more than to lose my accent.
Traditionally, I’ve had no trouble losing things. Car keys get lost in the black hole of my purse, important bills get lost in the black hole of my junk drawer and, horror or horrors, single, lonely shoes get lost in the black hole that lurks in the back of my closet. You get the picture. Black holes pulling at my belongings and storing them away in the void without any effort on my part.
But an accent is stickier than any of those objects. It took me a long time and a lot of effort to dismiss the strongest bits of mine. I took great care all through middle and high school to pluck every ain’t and ya’ll from my speech and erase all traces of a twang.
But I’ve since come to kind of regret my efforts.
The sign of my success came a couple of months ago when I walked into a store and asked an associate for help. She pointed me in the right direction but then gave me a funny look.
“Honey, where are you from?” she asked.
It turns out she thought I was from up North instead of 15 miles down the road from her store.
It was a success, but it made me feel disappointed. Having succeeded, even partially, in losing my accent I have the sinking feeling all I’ve done is make myself a little more vanilla than I used to be.
It used to seem like a mark of shame. It was a scarlet letter that glowed bright red and declared to all those I encountered that I was, in fact, a redneck in the eyes of the outside world.
I’ve grown more confident over the years. I now see my accent as part of my heritage — a little bit of home I carry around with me. But that isn’t the only reason I’ve come to terms with it.
A lot of it has to do with an excellent teacher I had in my final year of college.
My linguistics professor was a bit of an eccentric. Her best friends were her hoard of cats and her favorite topic of discussion, outside of language, was “Star Trek.” I liked her immediately.
She taught us how to analyze sentence structure and record dialects and talked about the evolution of language like she was giving a sermon.
But what really stuck with me was her conviction that accents weren’t right or a wrong, but simply were.
“If someone says it that way, then it’s right,” she used to tell us.
Her underlying philosophy was proper language is determined by those who use it, not by the people who publish grammar books. She marked my accent, and those of my fellow students, as legitimate.
And really that’s one of the things I love about words and writing. Language isn’t an end in itself but a tool to be used for our own purposes. It can be played with, changed and adapted to suit the purpose.
New words are, after all, created every year. Additions to the Oxford Dictionary of English this year include “frenemy” and “bromance,” and additions for next year probably haven’t even been coined yet. I love the idea the curators of English belong not in an ivory tower but on the streets.
Chances are that spoken English will continue to move away from what’s written in text books today until it evolves into something else entirely. I, for one, can’t wait to see the results.
KATIE BRANDENBURG can be reached at kbrandenburg@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2653.
