If you are interested in the answer to this question, take this short quiz here. (Thanks for sharing this one, Al.) Apparently, I have virtually no accent.
This was what I got at the end of my quiz:
“Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you’re a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.”
Interestingly, when I was still taking classes at Art Center, a Korean guy told me that I have the slightest twinges of a Korean-American accent. My fiance thinks it’s hokey-balokey; I think it’s probably true. In third grade I was even pulled out of class for speech testing because I had such a strange sense of pronunciation.
As an adult, it finally dawned on me that English was not my first language – in fact, my mom says that I didn’t start speaking English regularly until I went to preschool at four! It also explains why I say strange things like, “Don’t pass the bug” instead of “Don’t pass the buck.”
