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By Bethany, YES Abroad 2014-2015, South Africa

All of my life I’ve never thought that I, an Oregonian, had an accent. I thought “others” had accents such as people who grew up speaking British English, or people from the American South or Jamaica; but not me. My voice seems completely normal: I don’t accentuate my “a’s”, my voice isn’t immediately sweet and sophisticated, and before I arrived in South Africa with the YES Abroad program, I thought that there really wasn’t anything special at all about my accent.

However, now that’s not the case. Now I’m the one with an accent, and I seem to have an accentuated “American” accent. I recently gave a speech in English and when I finished, my teacher remarked about how different my accent is.

Here in South Africa everyone sounds so gentle and poetic to me, and that’s completely normal here. Here, there are many different accents based on geography and other factors, just as in the U.S. we might identify someone from the Eastern or Southern states based on an accent.

In the beginning of my exchange I was feeling insecure about sounding different than everyone else. It was just one more thing that set me apart: I already didn’t know my way around the school, and I didn’t have the same brands of clothes as anyone else. Everything about me was different. You wouldn’t know by just looking at me, but as soon as someone in South Africa starts a conversation with me, they know that I am different --it is a “dead giveaway.” I can adapt to enjoying the same food as everyone else, and I can wear the same uniform as everyone else, but as soon as I open my mouth and speak, I am revealed as an outsider. 

But now I love my accent. It is something that makes me different, and I’ve grown to enjoy being a little different. Everyone has told me that I will sound different when I return back to the U.S. and that my voice will slowly adapt to the voices I hear all around me here in South Africa. 

A few weeks ago I would have been excited to not be different anymore, but now I think it will be a little bittersweet.