{"id":123,"date":"2023-12-26T11:06:42","date_gmt":"2023-12-26T11:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/26\/transplanted-to-the-us-as-a-child-two-accents-seemed-like-a-great-idea-until-my-first-playdate-barbara-speed\/"},"modified":"2023-12-26T11:06:42","modified_gmt":"2023-12-26T11:06:42","slug":"transplanted-to-the-us-as-a-child-two-accents-seemed-like-a-great-idea-until-my-first-playdate-barbara-speed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/26\/transplanted-to-the-us-as-a-child-two-accents-seemed-like-a-great-idea-until-my-first-playdate-barbara-speed\/","title":{"rendered":"Transplanted to the US as a child, two accents seemed like a great idea. Until my first playdate | Barbara Speed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the baffling logic of a five-year-old, I concocted two versions of myself \u2013 and tried to stop anyone glimpsing the wrong one <\/p>\n<p>Aged five and a quarter, I was facing a conundrum. One term into my British school, where I knew everybody, I was moving thousands of miles across the world to the US, where I knew nobody. The school year was already well under way, which meant everyone would already have made friends with someone who wasn\u2019t the weird expat kid. My odds of fitting in were, to put it mildly, not great.<\/p>\n<p>And so I took action. When school started, I kept quiet as I furiously learned how to speak just like the American kids \u2013 to say \u201cflashlight\u201d and \u201ctrunk\u201d, \u201cbuddon\u201d instead of button, use round northwestern vowels, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/High_rising_terminal\">uptalk<\/a>. By the beginning of first grade, I sounded just like everyone else. Unfortunately, with the baffling logic of the under-10s, I had decided that my parents would feel betrayed if I lost my English accent. On top of that, we\u2019d be moving home in a few years\u2019 time \u2013 if I sounded American, I\u2019d be the odd one out all over again. So I landed on my genius plan: I\u2019d be Yankee at school and English at home, and neither side would be any the wiser.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2023\/dec\/26\/us-uk-two-accents-fit-in-\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the baffling logic of a five-year-old, I concocted two versions of myself \u2013 and tried to stop anyone glimpsing the wrong one Aged five and a quarter, I was facing a conundrum. One term into my British school, where I knew everybody, I was moving thousands of miles across the world to the US, &#8230; <a title=\"Transplanted to the US as a child, two accents seemed like a great idea. Until my first playdate | Barbara Speed\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/26\/transplanted-to-the-us-as-a-child-two-accents-seemed-like-a-great-idea-until-my-first-playdate-barbara-speed\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Transplanted to the US as a child, two accents seemed like a great idea. Until my first playdate | Barbara Speed\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}