My upbringing is so fundamentally different to my parents'. It must be strange to look at your child who not only speaks with a different accent but has a totally different view of the world.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We always seem to be a bit surprised that our children are reflecting stuff that we are showing them. I don't know about you, but every movie that I saw when I was a kid, I emulated. I was Haley Mills for an entire summer and had an English accent.
The kids think we're wacky. Mum and Dad are in showbiz - they don't know any other way. They've grown up travelling all over the world and are getting a worldly education. My son is 12 and he can speak eloquently on religions and cultures.
We've got so many different cultural groups in my family that I've had to learn to accommodate them in different ways. My father speaks different to my mum. My mum speaks different to my grandmother. Everybody speaks different, so you find you start tweaking your language to be more accessible to people.
Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different.
All my friends had grandparents who had accents. I thought all grandparents were supposed to have accents. My friends were all second-generation, as I was.
In my normal life, I do not speak with an accent. It's harder for people to realize my hearing loss in everyday life.
My accent has changed my whole life. When I was younger, it was very Nigerian, then when we went to England, it was very British. I think I have a very strange, hybrid accent, and I've worked very hard to get a solid American accent, which is what I use most of the time.
Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.
Both my parents are immigrants. I've seen different struggles they've had. There's a reason you don't see me using accents. I don't do impressions of my folks. When I'm doing a crappy impression of my folks, and you're laughing, I'm thinking, 'When my parents talk to people, when they walk away do people do impressions of them? Do they laugh?'
My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that.