The Mechanics of an Accent

Confession time: my accent when speaking Spanish is something that I am really quite proud of.

Strangely enough, it is also something that I can be somewhat embarrassed about, worried that Latinos will think that my adoption of a Spanish accent is a value judgment against Latin American accents. (This tends not to be the reaction, luckily.)

But did I choose my particular accent? Well, I thought my lisp was the extent of my Spanish accent. It was something that I intentionally implemented when it was explained by my professor in Madrid, and once I got over the feeling that I was making fun of the Spaniards, I ceased to realize I was even doing it. I don't know what else would make an accent Spanish, intonation, perhaps, but I apparently have it.

I dropped by the Spanish Speaking Organizations meeting today and ended up talking to a guy who I met through a friend at a salsa dance. He was going on and on about my accent--that when he first met me, he thought that I was a first generation American, perhaps having grown up speaking with Spanish parents at home, or grandparents at the very least. But compliments aside, he mentioned that he would not even know how to imitate a Spanish accent accurately. I can't do any justice to any other Spanish accent. Nor can I do a great job at any other English accent (of which there are many more than I once thought, but more on this later).

I've been thinking about this for a while. We can identify accents in our native language by the way they sound, but we are often not aware enough of why they sound how they do to authentically imitate them. What makes an accent sound like it does? Obviously, it's the pronunciation of certain letters and also intonations, but what are they? Sometimes, during my HCI class, I listen to my professor's British accent, noticing that she doesn't say Rs that come at the end of words or directly before a consonant. So far, this is the only absolute characteristic that I have been able to observe. I've learned that differences between Spanish accents are often very dependent on how heavily the final S is aspirated, but trying out this one trait alone doesn't make me sound Cuban.

One more unrelated observation on the subject of accents, but I've often acknowledged only a narrow list of accents in English as being native--American, English, Irish, Scottish, Australian, Canadian and all of their numerous regional variations. But recently I've become aware that there are a lot of other places where people speak English as a first language who have other accents that we might not be inclined to identify as native, even though their English is indeed native--India, Singapore, Nigeria, to name a few.

I'm sure Wikipedia has articles on this (I've read about accents there before) so maybe I'll look there for more info. Have you ever paid attention to the mechanics of an accent? What did you find out?