The speech of your life: how accents affect the way we live
Our personal accents are as natural as breathing – but they also shape the way other people perceive us. Which is something I find out on a daily basis, living in the US with a husband from Northern Ireland
The other day, my husband David and I were chatting when our eight-year-old approached, a slight smirk upon his face. “Daddy?” he asked. “How do you say car in Japanese? Is it kee-yar?”
This led to a burst of laughter from me, and a roll of the eyes from my husband. Kee-yar is David’s Northern Irish pronunciation of “car”. His two-syllable “car” was something of a joke between us way back when we started dating, ...
