Papa Apu, is that you?

September 16, 2009 7:35 PM

Why can't I, and how can I, hear my dad's accent?

My dad moved to the US from India when he was 19. My mom is an all-American white woman. People tell me that my dad has a fairly thick Indian accent, but I don't hear it at all. It's not that I hear it but don't have trouble understanding it; I don't hear it at all, and he sounds just like any other person to me. I can hear the accent of other Indian people, including all my Indian relatives, but I don't have any trouble understanding them. I can also do a pretty decent Indian accent :)

I assume that I can't hear my dad's accent because I grew up with it. But the weird thing is, even if, for example, he calls and I don't know its him on the phone, I still don't hear it. Would it be possible for me to hear his accent if I was somehow surprised by him? Or if I heard his voice somehow distorted so I didn't recognize it as him immediately? Is there any way to get around my brain's auto-correction that turns his voice into something I recognize as "American"?

posted by Saxon Kane to science & nature (21 comments total)

I bet you could rig something up with voice changer software that could change the pitch or other features of his voice. You might also want to change the voices of a few other people and listen to them blind to the speakers' identities.
posted by i love cheese at 7:40 PM on September 16

Most Americans hear a slight accent and say it's "thick". He probably really does not have a thick accent, since he's been living in the U.S. for a long time now.
posted by Zambrano at 7:40 PM on September 16 [4 favorites]

It's gotta be brain wiring from an early age. FWIW, I had the exact same thing with my Irish grandparents. My friends would imitate their accents for me, and their imitations sounded nothing like how I heard their voices. But other Irish people? All faith and begorrah and jaysus to my ears. Just couldn't ever hear my grandparents the same way, even though they'd use some of the same words.

I'm not good speaking in accents. But today, for some reason, I'm way, way better than anyone I know at deciphering thick British/Irish/Scot/Aussie/Kiwi accents. Trainspotting? I don't need the subtitles. The Full Monty? I was translating it for my wife.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:06 PM on September 16 [1 favorite]

My mom is from Ireland and people tells me she has a brogue but I've almost never been able to hear it, I just hear my mom. It's not that she's lost it, being in America since the 60s, it's just that I cannot hear her accent. Neither can my brothers. She has a sister who has been in the US just as long and I can hear her accent, the same with another sister and brother still in Ireland.

I feel your pain. It's always been weird, everyone telling my how cute my mom's brogue is and I can't hear it.

The only time I've ever been able to pick out my mom's accent (and, like you, I've tried) is when she's talking to one of her sisters. I've only seen her with a sister maybe four times in my life, but either her accent gets thicker or my ear hears things differently because of the Irish overload, I dunno. My wife says my Boston accent gets thicker when I'm talking to one of my friends from childhood.

My advice: get your dad around some relatives you don't hear often, or even just other people with similar accents. Folks whose accents you can hear. His accent might get a small bit thicker and sound a bit different to you, and you might be able to pick it out. That's probably the best chance you'll have.

Frustrating, isn't it?
posted by bondcliff at 8:09 PM on September 16 [1 favorite]

My Baba was from Yugoslavia, and had the thickest accent ever. My dad could never hear it while she was alive, yet my mom, brother and myself could barely understand her. However, Baba recorded her memoirs from WWII on videotape, and he could hear the accent then. I suppose it has something to do with living with it all your life. I suggest recording him and playing it back to yourself to see if you can hear the accent.
posted by ThaBombShelterSmith at 8:27 PM on September 16 [1 favorite]

I had a Chinese harp teacher for seven years. At first, I had a hard time understanding her. Another music teacher of mine who saw her every now and then made some comment after I had known her for a while about how thick her accent was. I thought that her accent had just gotten more American, but I think it was just that I saw her so much that I didn't hear it as distinct than other Americans I encountered regularly.
posted by emilyd22222 at 8:55 PM on September 16

The coolest story I ever read was from a girl who as a child used to be very embarrassed by her mother's foreign accent and was so embarrassed she was afraid of inviting friends over to her house. It ended with her inviting a friend over and realizing it was no big deal, and then she said how now as an adult she doesn't even hear her mother's accent.
So when I read your post it looked to my like something very awesome, that you don't hear his accent.
posted by alona at 8:57 PM on September 16

ha! I thought it was just me - I can't hear my mother's german accent at all, and can just barely pick up my dad's. To hear his, I listen for specific sounds that I know he pronounces differently - like he'll say west when he means vest - so maybe that's something you can try.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 9:13 PM on September 16

Just to add my two cents-- I can't hear my dad's either. I've been told his is a very thick German accent... but I can't for the life of me hear it.

That being said-- after talking to him for an hour or so, I do notice that my grammar shifts to technically-correct-but-not-standard-America-english. That is, I start rearranging prepositional phrase order-- "I will go, tomorrow, to the bank." without thinking about it.

/many friends are able to, after a few minutes, ask "So, how's your dad doin'?". The reply is usually my best five year old "pbbth" noise.
posted by Seeba at 9:18 PM on September 16

I don't hear my mom's Bronx accent either when I talk to her but when I've heard her recorded on tape, I do.
posted by octothorpe at 9:37 PM on September 16

Oh, and very cool question.
posted by octothorpe at 9:37 PM on September 16

It's gotta be brain wiring from an early age.

I don't think so, this has happened to me as an adult and it doesn't take years (more like six months regular interactions to be gone). I know several people with different kinds of accents, incuding a couple I remember really liking, that I no longer hear. I'd be interested to know what mechanisms in the brain are causing this.

The main thing, for me at least, is to hear it reasonably often. Someone I work with has a fairly strong French accent which faded so I didn't notice it, but after not seeing her for a year I was back to having trouble understanding anything she said. I don't see her as regularly now so I still notice it, although much less than after the gap, and the strength of her accent correlates much more strongly with when I've last seen her than anything else I can think of. Hearing a voice every day for years and years has got to make an impression. I'd say from my experience at least that one way to hear your Dad's accent is to not talk to him for a long time, which probably isn't something you want to try!
posted by shelleycat at 9:41 PM on September 16

My mum doesn't sound english. My mum sounds like my mum. I think her voice is just too familiar for me to hear past the fact that it's my mum. The only time I ever heard my Mum's accent was when I heard a newsreader on CNN that sounded exactly like her, and then I realised that the newsreader was English.

Ask your friends what sounds are specifically "Indian" in your dad's speech, you might be able to hear specific sounds or words.
posted by kjs4 at 10:04 PM on September 16

Listen to your dad to spend about fifteen minutes speaking to you in his native language. Doesn't mater whether or not you understand that, you just want to hear his native phonemes when he's not trying to split/group them into English phonemes.

Then listen to him in English.
posted by orthogonality at 11:12 PM on September 16

I'm not well versed in phonetic theory regarding accent perception (but I am a linguist). I'd make an educated guess and say you have a certain amount of perceptual accommodation going on based on repeated exposure to your dad's voice. You're not crazy, you really can't hear his accent! Yet.

There are a whole ton of sounds that occur in our speech that we're not hearing. Once you start training your ear (and a little knowledge of IPA helps), you'll start hearing all sorts of stuff. It's just that we normally don't because those sounds aren't linguistically meaningful to us in our daily language/dialect. For example, there's three distinct forms of the plural in English:

the 'z' sound that we hear after voiced consonants, as in dogs or hugs
the 's' sound that we hear after voiceless consonants, as in cats or ducks
the 'ehz' sound that we hear after a special class of consonants, as is peaches or judges.

Or try this...hold your hand about about two inches away from your mouth and say the word 'stop'. Now say the word 'top'. Notice how when you say top, you can feel air hit your hand, but not when you say stop? The 't' in both those words is actually very different, but I bet you can't hear that difference because you recognize both as plain ole 't'. There's no incentive to go deeper. (In some languages, the difference between those two sounds is distinctive. Meaning, if you had near identical words, but only differing in the puffed air t-sound and the non-airy t-sound, you'd actually have two totally different words with different meanings.)

Anyways, there are literally hundreds of these sound alternations, happening all the time. If you want to start hearing them, you can train your ear with a little bit of linguistic knowledge. Maybe start with the IPA and prosody.

All that said, I wouldn't worry about this unless it's something you want to pursue out of curiosity or whatnot. It's nothing to get bent about, and you're certainly not defective in any way. This is just one of the weird things that happens with language and sound. I also doubt that you could 'surprise yourself' into hearing accent features with some altered form of your dad's voice. You'd probably have to mask (ie. remove) the very things you're trying to hear. But this in of itself opens up a huge, unsolved controversy in linguistics about how we perceive sound and store elements of speech in our heads (exemplar theory, etc.). Nobody can really pin down the answers because they're either moving targets, or we can't peer inside the 'black box'. Anyways, I hope I've helped.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:20 PM on September 16 [3 favorites]

Seconding iamkimiam. I come from northern lower Michigan and grew up with a really thick not-quite-Yooper accent. Though I'd never have known it until people started pointing it out. I got to training my ear to hear it, and now I can hear accents in folks I never thought had them (including myself).

It's like training your ear to pick out what the bassoons are doing in orchestral music, or hunting for the spice blends underlying flavors. Once you learn a few simple rules about what's there and how to look for and identify it, suddenly WHOA THERE'S A LOT OF GINGER IN THAT AND CHECK OUT THAT OBOE PLAYER.
posted by scrowdid at 11:28 PM on September 16 [3 favorites]

By the way, I don't mean to imply that you just don't know how to hear accents. I think you can be pretty competent in accents and still be surprised by pronunciation nuances you've never noticed.
posted by scrowdid at 11:38 PM on September 16

I had a friend who was first-generation Lithuanian American. She couldn't hear her parents' accent at all, but was aware that others heard it clearly. Her parent sounded like native American-English speakers to her. I also have a friend who is first generation Philippina-American and she does a great (and hilarious) imitation of her mother's accent. She thought it was strange that anyone would think she couldn't hear her parents' accent.
posted by Piscean at 12:17 AM on September 17

The ear acclimates. My husband does not have an English accent to me; he has no accent. I have no accent to him either. All of Ireland sounded very accenty-when we moved here, and now I don't hear the accent at all. Conversely, when I hear random Americans who are not family members with whom I speak regularly, the accent is like nails on a chalkboard to me.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:56 AM on September 17

Maybe you could have someone do an imitation of him for you. They would probably exaggerate his accent a bit, and maybe you could hear it once you know what other people are hearing.
posted by crickets at 6:38 AM on September 17

My parents are from Yorkshire, but live in the US. My mother has been asked if she is German more than once while shopping, talking on the phone, etc. I don't think they have strong accents, but maybe that's because my ear is used to the "default" accent being a northern British one. So maybe you're finely attuned to your dad's (probably slight) Indian accent.
posted by vickyverky at 11:20 AM on September 17