accent deafness

In addition to celebrating her half-birthday, Grover started (BrE) crèche/(AmE) daycare last week. It's the campus crèche, and it's really great, for many reasons. For one, it has a very gentle acclimation process--after three sessions, Grover is only up to 40-minute stays. For another, each baby is assigned a primary carer. We were assigned to E, and since the parent doesn't leave at all for the first session, E and I spent a lot of time discussing Grover's habits and her likes and dislikes.

When I got home that night, I told Better Half all about our day, and he was particularly amused by one part of the story: E and I had been talking for about an hour before she and I reali{s/z}ed that we were both American. BH is constantly bemused by my accent-deafness and will quiz me after any brief conversations with strangers who have an accent of the British Isles that's not the local accent. I've usually been paying no attention to the accent and have to take a wild guess. Now he's started saying "What was {his/her} accent?" after we pass people in the street who are American. (Even if I haven't been listening, I guess 'American' because that's all he's asking me about now. He never expects anything more specific than 'American', happily.)

My excuse for missing E's accent is that she's from New York State too, and when I am talking to someone with the same accent as me, I tend not to cotton on to the fact that they have an accent. It's that old "I don't have an accent, everyone else does" syndrome, that's so faulty, but so easily slipped into. (The only problem with this theory is that she's not from the same part of the state as me, and so once I knew where she was from, I started to notice some differences in our vowels. I suppose I could use the excuse "I was too worried about the fate of my firstborn to pay attention to accents.")

I do notice American accents that aren't as similar to mine--particularly midwestern and southern ones spoken by tourists. Or loud exchange students from any part of the country--and most of them are loud (and plenty of tourists are too). They haven't learn{ed/t} to lower their volume when outside the States, and they seem to think of their conversations on trains and in restaurants as performances that anyone should be able to have a seat for. I think this has a lot to do with different senses of 'privacy' in the different countries--loud-talking Americans may be hoping that you'll join them in the conversation. But you know what? That's fodder for a separate blog post.

So, I often miss accents. I rarely pay any attention to the sounds of others' speech--I skip straight to the words and meaning. Is it any surprise that I became a lexical semanticist rather than a phonetician?

Of course, it's possible that it's not just me--maybe accent deafness is an American condition. We're fairly sensitive to some differences within America--e.g. north v(s). south--but the British are very sensitive to ways of speaking due in part to the connection between accent and social class. Some evidence in favo(u)r of American Accent Deafness: sometimes American tourists don't seem to reali{s/z}e that I'm American--for instance when they stop me on the street for directions or start up a conversation in a (chiefly BrE) queue. And I've also had the experience of Americans in the US thinking I'm British just because I have an address in England. While my accent has changed a bit since moving here, it's still very definitely American. (Maybe they just don't know a lot about British accents--but I don't have that excuse.)

I should be clear here, the 'deafness' is more like inattention. I can hear the difference between accent A and accent B--I just have to think fairly consciously about them to do so.

So, are there more tales out there like that of E and me? And is it an American thing?