I speak like this, but I can sahpeak like dis.

All throughout my early childhood, I struggled with subtleties in my accent and daily speech patterns constantly giving away the fact that English was not my first language. With a slight lisp, a non-rhotic speech that avoided consonant clusters, and a diction sprinkled with peculiar British English tendencies, you would probably be remarkably confused about my ethnicity or background. 

This mutant blend of language and accents was a result of my bilingual and familial background. However, before getting into how I developed such a strange sound, it helps to explain my family situation and upbringing. Having grown up in Thailand, I attended an international trilingual primary school that instructed its students in three languages: Thai, English, and Chinese. The reason for having an international education was because of where my parents were physically and economically based. Because of that, I floated and teetered on the edges of culture and society, constantly travelling back and forth between America and Thailand; between the languages of both English and Thai. 

My mom is extremely Thai being both born and raised there. Like me, she also received an international education; however, it was not out of necessity, but because her family simply had the money. She attended university in America at Arizona State University, but just like me, the sounds that came out of her mouth didn’t flow as smoothly as her peers. Instead, her speech removed letters of the English alphabet, warped different sounds and tones, or mashed together the different grammatical structures. On the other hand, my dad is ethnically Chinese, but he was born in Laos. However, during the Vietnam War, he was forced to relocate at an early age and sought freedom as a young refugee struggling to survive in America. More specifically, he was sponsored by a church all the way out in Minnesota, one of the coldest and least diverse places in the United States at the time. As a result and as time went on, he lost touch with much of his Chinese background; however, he retained his ability to speak Laotian as that was what his mother chose to speak with him at home. Besides that, my dad speaks like a second or third generation American citizen with no signs of any accent.

Anyways, because of my parents’ work, I constantly moved around from one place to another, perpetually bouncing around from country to country, city to city, and school to school. Whenever we would move into a new place, we would leave things in boxes and lay our mattresses on the floor without bed frames. When are we stop moving? I asked. Soon, na. Mai thong pen huang, don’t worry too much. My mom would always comfort me or reply to me in a mixture of Thai and English. Whenever she spoke English at home, she would cut up her sentences and slip in Thai words or occasionally attach sentence ending particles. Looking back at it now, I believe it was this aspect of my life at home that really influenced how I spoke to others inside and outside of my household as well as to Thai people and non-Thai people.

What really puzzles me though is how my parents and I grew to develop different speech patterns despite having similar backgrounds in language. My mom persisted in her Thai-English speech, but my dad had fully assimilated and conformed to his new country’s tongue. I wondered what had caused them to settle and retain such habits of speech, but I later figured it out. It hadn’t occurred to me why things were that way until I spent some time in both the American education system and subsequently, the international schooling community in Thailand. 

I believe it was around the first grade when I had permanently moved to California and experienced a particularly memorable interaction with a fellow classmate. On the first day of school, our teacher began by introducing herself and her background. Soon after she was done with her spiel, she instructed our class to introduce ourselves to the neighbors around us. As I turned to the boy sitting next to me, the first thing I noticed was how messily his school uniform was worn and how chaotic he appeared. His white button down shirt remained untucked under his stretched maroon sweater. The clip-on tie around his neck left more than enough room to breathe and his trousers were in desperate need of a steaming or ironing session. The moment he separated his two lips and opened his mouth to speak, I couldn’t help but freeze my lungs at the stale odor coming from his moist morning breath. Jerry, hi.  His sheer presence screamed ‘unpredictable’ to me. I had to remind myself. I speak like this. Nervous, unconfident, and in fear of being discovered, I introduced myself in my best American accent. My name is Tyler. Interestingly enough, he didn’t seem suspicious of my forced speech at all. 

That following summer and other following summers, I would go back to Thailand as a transfer student to take summer classes. When I returned back to Thailand, I would converse and interact in the native Thai, but whenever I spoke English to someone over there, I would unconsciously slip back into speaking the aforementioned Thai-accented English in order to have the local people be able to understand what I was saying. Over there, I sahpeak like dis. Strangely enough, if I spoke fluent English back in Thailand, it would be much harder for people to understand me.

With events like these, I began to notice how my environment really influenced how I presented myself and communicated with others. My pronunciation and grammatical structure drastically changes on who I am talking to and where I currently am. Growing up, everyone in my circle of friends and within my family spoke at least two languages, dialects, or as Amy Tan put it: ‘Englishes’. As a result, my identities also flowed between the barriers of different cultures, while my parents remained stuck on one side or the other. They remained fixated to a location much longer than me, thus developing a more biased speech, while I, on the other hand, oscillated between two environments, thus developing a transitional speech pattern. If you had met me ten or so years ago and asked me where I was from, I would most likely give a shaky answer explaining my living circumstances; however, if you had asked me now, I would certainly say both Thailand and Bay Area. It was through experiences like these where I made choices to portray myself in a certain way, whether it be to stay loyal to my linguistic roots or to assimilate and blend into society.