I mentioned last week the oddly charming effect of seeing someone raised in India speaking English with a distinct German accent -- because he'd been working for a German car company for decades. Reader Mike Baab weighs in:
As an American who's lived in London and now Copenhagen, the ethnicity-accent disparity is becoming one of my favorite things about living 'in-Continent'. One of my good friends was born to Vietnamese immigrants living in Paris, and speaks with an accent so French that if one of your English-speaking friends did it, you'd be offended. I love watching my American friends try to figure out this ethnically Asian guy smoking a cigarette and ending sentences with 'non?'
I have no data to back this up, but I anecdotally see this more and more when I travel around Europe. I was in Stockholm last summer, and heard a group of mostly black schoolgirls practicing their English in a train station, 'jaaaa' and all.
The increasing distance between ethnicity and nationality is something I really like about living here, and whenever I get discouraged about European insularity, I think of those girls on their first trip to America, and the looks on people's faces when they say 'Vi are from Svee-den!'
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James Fallows is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the 2018 book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which was a national best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.