Foreign-born professionals drop the accents

NorthJersey.com ^ | 09.28.06 | KAYCE T. ATAIYERO

[Ax]

Back in 1983, I had to see a cardiologist. I picked a name from the Yellow Pages, and was finally ushered in to see a small dark man in a crisp white lab coat. He was from India, but took his MD from George Washington, and was an FACC. He identified my problem, and with an accent like Apu's from the Simpsons, and set up a bypass operation at the Washington Hospital Center. I credit this man with saving my life. The surgeon that cut me was a Pakistani, whose English was unaccented; also on the team was a Filipino, a Peruvian and a token Yankee.

[Revolting cat!]

Multi-culti can be great, sure, my personal physician now is Vietnamese and the best one I've ever had, but it can get lonely too, when they don't get your references to Bugs Bunny and such, which is my current situation at work.

[Ax]

When a guy is hovering over your torso with a scalpel, I tend to tone down and "multi-cultural" and "diversity" jokes. "Two mullahs walk into a bar...."

[Fred Hayek]

I'm originally from northern New Jersey, but after some traveling and an association with the military, tended to be placed somewhere in the Midwest - even when in college an Illinois native placed me in the Chicagoland area. Of course after living in Houston for 12 years one local there placed me around Beaumont.

[NYFriend]

For a guy from New York, it was weird walking into my favorite London fish and chips joint at night, seeing a young guy of Indian ancestry behind the counter and knowing your going to have trouble understanding him because of his (Cockney)accent.

I think back to it and have to laugh. Years ago, when I worked in Lower Manhattan, I used to go to a Indian take out place run by Asians (as in Chinese) people, that was on the same block as a Chinese takeout place run by either Indians or Pakistanis. No problem. I loved both places, and that's New York. That's America. England is buying fish and chips from a "foreign looking guy" who talks like a Dickens character.

[Shion]

My wife is ridiculous, she's grew up in the South, West Cost, Midwest, Hawaii, and both Upstate and Downstate New York. Every word has a different accent, and some how she picked up an Estuary English accent once when we were over there.

My husband is like that: born in Africa, raised all over the place including England and Jamaica, but now speaks Marine.

Yes, Marine Corps is also an accent. :)

My favorite are all his malapropisms where the saying didn't quite translate right and/or didn't make sense in the African bush.