Published on 12, July, 2020
I grew up in a fairly rough part of Glasgow and went to school with people with very thick working class Glaswegian accents, but everyone always described me as "posh". I even remember a local shopkeeper asking my mum where I was from once. I never understood how I ended up with a different accent. But it occurred to me recently that I have three cousins who are siblings and two of them have very rough accents but one sounds an awful lot like me. You wouldn't believe she was related to her siblings.
Is this an autistic thing? Or is my accent just a freak of nature?
I think that I have a 'generalised Northern English accent', I say path and bath with short 'A's. I can use my native accent if I want to, but it isn't my day-to-day speech. That has been RP-influenced, to some extent, as I have lost the emphatic 'U' and rhoticity of my native accent/dialect. I never use glottal stops and never use intrusive 'R' sounds - I say drawing and not drawring. My pronunciation is quite precise, possibly a bit prissy. I have been told by non-native speakers of English that I am easy to understand.
It’s always been by my opinion that the purpose of language is the efficient and accurate exchange of information.
I’ve always been perplexed by people who use language as a badge of identity or a political tool (a problem here in Scotland). A language, accent or dialect that can’t be used to communicate just seems pointless to me.
Perhaps this shapes how autistic people use language.
I find some things more easily understood or expressed in certain languages than in others. for example:
talking about money - English
sharing feelings - castillian
sharing enthusiasms -Japanese
getting an intellectual point across- french
sarcastic humor - Italian
Also, for me, languages are part of a peoples cultural heritage and they express something deep in the collective psyche that just cant be expressed using another language.
Singing Fado, for example, in, say German.. wont work on some deep pre-languange level. it's spawned of Portuguese, its in the gestalt of it.
I can feel the various synaptic byways I use in my brain for different languages, as they flare into action when I speak them or hear them.
I would miss languages if they became obsolete, like loosing colors on the rainbow.
Here Hawaiian is coming back after it was almost lost for good when the missionaries came and forbade its use. It is such a lovely language!
I guess you can tell I really love languages.
you are also from Hawaii too? cool