I’m Not Pretentious, I’m Just Bilingual

My accents aren’t meant to be fancy

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I refuse to say “A-pel” or “Spot-i-fy” or “cOh-ver”.

It gives me what the kids call “the ick”. It makes the hair hatching under my skin regress into its original follicle.

I refuse to mispronounce something that I actually know how to pronounce correctly, just to fit in.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine if someone who doesn’t know how to say something mispronounces it. They’re just doing their best.

But I know how to say it. So I do. But of course, then someone has to go ahead and say,

“Oh, look at me, I say (insert correctly pronounced word), I’m so fancy!”

If I’m being honest, my accent does change by no active attempt of my own (that I am aware of), based on who I am with. Like a strange chameleonic radar that fine-tunes itself subconsciously.

I’m sure you know exactly what I am talking about here.

I was born in Portugal but moved to the U.S. at age two, so I was essentially introduced to two languages at the same time. I was exposed to Portuguese slightly before English, and continued to speak Portuguese at home as I grew up abroad, but English has always been the language I studied and socialized in.