A verbal chameleon

I was brought to another forceful realisation yesterday about how much my accent is capable of changing. I met a Singaporean who was back from the US, with an almost flawless American accent, and suddenly I felt like a hopelessly shabby speaker in comparison. I used to "Oh, really?" and "Awesome!" and "Cool!" with the best of them. Now I'm like, "Wah lau eh..."

But the environmental adaptation swings both ways. When I hang out with people who speak a slightly different brand of Singlish from what I grew up with, their linguistic idiosyncrasies start creeping into my conversations. Before this year, I'm pretty sure I never used sial, not even when I had a student six years ago who liberally punctuated his casual exclamation with that word (ampulets, remember him?). Thanks to Stellou (woman, call me already or at least email me your local cell number once you have it), I now flick off the cheh with panache and punch through with repeated, "And then?"s as well. (Stellou, nobody gets that reference except you and me. Bloody hell, now I'm tainted by your proclivity for parenthetical comments again.) I firmly blame Terz for the fact that I use "right" so often to express assent. And I say "no worries" all the time, even though it's apparently a distinctly Aussie turn of phrase and I haven't been Down Under since 1989.

Even in SMS I find that I gradually adopt the syntax, register and habits of the people I correspond with. If people use more Singlish, I respond in kind. Casey rarely punctuates his messages to me, so I'm a little lax with the punctuation when I SMS him --- even though the grammar cop in me gets really annoyed when that happens. Another friend tends towards punctuating his sentences with "ha ha" and I find myself reciprocating, using the phrase in lieu of the upper case U, umlaut (Ü) that's otherwise my default smiley symbol in SMS. Even the fact that I spell everything in full and construct grammatically sound sentences in SMS can be attributed to G-man, who inducted me into SMSing when I got my first cellphone. G-man and I can compose entire novellas through SMS, if we have to.

So much for the written/touch-typed word. Where does my accent lie? When I was in the US, people thought I sounded British. In the UK, they thought I was American. I've never had any trouble passing as local in Singapore, as opposed to the friend who encountered a cab driver who insisted, "You're not local!" because he had a not-very-Singlish (while still Singaporean) accent.

And then there's the voice in my head --- you know, the voice you think in. That one's Singlish-free, prone to Americanisms like "like", frightfully grammatical, except when it doesn't complete its sentences, but also completely accent-free. It doesn't drawl, it doesn't slouch, it articulates each word one by one. I may not say it like I think it, depending on the environment in which I'm saying it, but the original thought lingers, in the hum of its pure neutrality.

Weird, huh?

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