The voice doesn't match the face

[muckefuck]

During the year in the early 80s when my parents were giving cable television a try (over our objections they ultimately decided it wasn't worth the money), I watched a lot of Nickelodeon. My favourite show was a British juvenile scifi series called The Tomorrow People. The premise was that the "next step in human eevolution" was psychic powers and that there existed an organisation devoted to finding children exhibiting these and giving them training and support.

As you might expect, this setup allowed for a diversity of casting choices. One of my favourite characters was Scottish, but I also remember a Romany boy and a Black girl. One time, I was watching the show in the company of a baby sitter, and she was struck by the last of these. "I just never heard a black person talk like that." I recall finding her reaction odd, which suggests that it must never occurred to me there was anything unusual about someone who looked African having an English accent. After all, the black people on American television (mostly) sounded the same as the white people on those shows. Why wouldn't it be the same on English television?

Later, I did have a similar reaction, only in reverse, the first time I met a white person who spoke AAVE. It wasn't the first time I'd heard this; hearing whites "talk black" for comic effect was common enough when I was growing up. (Recall, for instance, the elderly white lady in Airplane! who tells the stewardess, "I speak jive" and proceeds to interpret for two black passengers.) What I found unusual, however, was that there would be someone who wasn't black who apparently spoke this way without having to put it on.

Can you all think of other examples where the accent doesn't fit the stereotype? While at the student mailroom in college, I overheard a conversation between a Japanese-American coworker and one of her Asian friends about a mutual acquaintance of theirs, also Asian-American but from the Deep South. They both found this person's strong Southern drawl remarkable. "Asians aren't supposed to have accents!" said my coworker--ironically, in what I would eventually learn to recognise as a fairly characteristic educated Chicago accent.

Some years later, I went to visit my college friend ladytiamat and was greeted at the door by her Korean-American roommate, who had a startlingly rural Midwestern twang to her speech. I learned that she was an adoptee raised in central Iowa. Her accent was one I wouldn't have found the least bit out of the ordinary coming from a Caucasian. Thinking back, I suspect it was her manner that took me aback as much as her speech. There were a lot of Koreans at my college, some American-born and some Korean-born, but most with similar ways of comporting themselves. The women tended to be shy and quiet, and this girl was anything but.

What prompted me to think of this was a friend's neighbour, who comes from the Chinese community in Peru. I wonder how most Americans read people like him, as "Hispanic" or as "Asian"? And what about Japanese-Brazilians? I'm guessing appearance trumps accent, but I could be wrong about that.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That last story is amazing. It reminds me of the anecdote I once read about a black man walking into an Irish bar in NYC and having the old timers switch into Irish so they could badmouth him. Except that, just their luck, he was from Trinidad, his school was run by Christian Brothers, and he learned to speak Irish there. (I suspect it isn't true, but I want it so much to be.)

I find that appearance is key when it comes to trying to determine what is being spoken by people I'm eavesdropping on on public transit. I'll often revise my guess dramatically if I discover, for instance, that the speakers appear West African instead of Southeast Asian, or what-have-you.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I tried Googling for evidence of that anecdote, and look what turned up!

One night, when Maxwell (his name was either John or George, like his ancestors, but I can’t remember which) was a young man, he and another man stopped in at a rural Cape Breton house which was the home of a Gaelic-speaking family. The men were on a hunting trip and needed a place to stay, either that or they were just on their way somewhere and the weather turned ugly; whichever it was, it was quite common in those days for people in rural Cape Breton to give anyone who showed up a home-cooked meal and a bed to sleep on, whether they knew the visitors or not. These particular homeowners took the young men in, but the lady of the house said in Gaelic to the white half of the pair, ‘If you think I’m feeding that black thing there, you’re crazy.’

Well, things got smoothed over and the two men enjoyed a hearty meal and a good night’s sleep. The next morning, as he was heading out the door, young Maxwell turned to the old couple and said, in perfectly fluent Gaelic, ‘Thank you very much for the food and the bed. I really appreciate it.’ Something like that, but I’m sure you get the picture. I imagine the next thing heard after he said it was the sound of an old lady falling onto a wooden floor, unless her husband caught her. Priceless.

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

The "Korean Scotsman" Starburst ads are predicated on this very thing.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

I admit to finding Bobby Jindal's Louisiana drawl kind of hypnotic. I'm sure it must be because of the kind of cognitive dissonance you're talking about.

One time I listened to him for like half an hour at a press conference describing what every single first responder in the state of Louisiana was doing at that very moment on CNN during a hurricane they were having down there. (In my defense, I was sewing at the time, and I did finally get up and change the channel ...)

...

[dorisduke.livejournal.com]

In Dublin when I was a kid we went to a Chinese restaurant and the Chinese waiter had the thickest of Irish accents and I was taken aback for a few moments. But then my father turned a bowl of soup upside down to see the bottom of the bowl without realizing there was soup in it and that cleared my mind of his accent right away.

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

A deshi kid with a THICK NJ accent just freaked me out, too weird.

A two pals of mine used to go to Devon for various meals, I swear half the reason they went was to freak out the wait staff, one was Indian American, her parents were from distinct regions of Southern India, she wasn't raised in either language. The other was starkly blonde and fluent in Hindi, Malayalaam. The staff would address the indian looking one one freaked out when the Blonde would order and follow up about the specifications of how things were prepared.


But my favorite moment, was one I was involved in. When I was a kid Minnie Minoso the White Sox player was signing autographs at the Mall, I was maybe in the middle of year two of Junior High School Spanish. My younger brother and I get to table where he is signing photos and he says to me, " Como te llamas?" Delighted out of my nearly 11 year old mind that this question fell well within my range of functional Spanish, replied, "Me llamo Molly". He follows up "De donde eres ? Mt. Prospect,, he rephrases "Sus padres? Psyched at my run of functional Spanish luck (why isn't my Spanish Teacher here to witness this?!?) with yet another question I can answer, "Mis padres son de India (I am dead certain I made a ser v. estar error). Look of profound confusion from the baseball legend, "India?" "Si" We thanked him for the autographs and made way for the people behind us.

[gopower.livejournal.com]

BTW, the elderly white lady in "Airplane" is June Cleaver, or rather, she is the actress who played the mother on "Leave It to Beaver." That extra bit of white bread made the joke. Just some trivia on the off chance you missed "Nick at Nite" during the cable-less years.