Quote:
Originally Posted by Fabienne
How would you qualify your accent in English? Nobody ever wants to guess based on my accent, strangely. I don't think it's your typical French accent, for sure.
My wife, even though she is American, after living with me for almost 8 years can tell that while at face value I have a flat english accent there are syntactical and pronounciative (sp?) quirks that I exhibit that throw it off. Plus I can sound a wee bit old fashioned when I am going full-kilter english (as oppossed to speaking to people around me in Tucson) due to the fact that I grew up without much contemporary english slang. Anyway, the problem being bilingual like I is that though you speak two languages very well neither is perfect. As for your accent, people in the USA in general seem to have difficulty with that anyway. I can often guess correctly specific regions of Europe from the way people look and talk as you probably can. Of course, I can tell a Cypriot from a 100 paces

Edit: Funny sidenote. After living with me for so long, my wife has seriously freaked out some of her clients out by working out in one go where they are from. That happenned with several Cypiot students, needless to say they were usually flabbergasted considering we are used to people not knowing our country even exists, never mind knowing what we look or sound like. Edit 2: "She has often followed up the "you are from Cyprus, right?" with "From Limassol? Oh I miss having the gyros and shawarma at Sam's. Haver you been there recently?"
