Lately I have been wishing that I had some kind of accent. I do not
wish this purely out of vanity—I do not think that accents are inherently arousing.
What would that imply, to say that foreigners or non-native speakers of English
have a special monopoly on arousing speech?No. I wish now that I had an accent
because I believe in it as a strategy to slow down one's train of thought and
that, particularly in excitable states, the difficulty of slogging through
pronunciation, the deliberation and careful choosing of simple, essential words
and phrasing, could be the only way I could ever hope to express myself
clearly.
This leads me to a troubling conclusion: that I must double
my efforts to speak a foreign language and then immerse myself in its native
culture. English, then, could become my accent and to foreigners in a foreign
land, and I could really, really get it done.
