Broken Accent
144 words
While in France I constantly had to tell people I didn’t speak French, yet in Mexico, I am sometimes told I speak my timid, limited Spanish with a French accent.
Months ago on Air France from Madrid to Paris, I hesitated to use Spanish, afraid I may seem to be a Frenchwoman avoiding her own language.
A waiter in Paris kept defaulting back to French with me, my face somehow contradicting the French illiteracy I’d claimed. He apologized, but I did seem French, he said, so I told him what Mexicans often tell me.
The waiter thought it was a game: Say something in Spanish! I politely refused.
Another stranger in Mexico recently asked me where I was from, puzzling over the sound of my voice.
It’s not that you speak broken Spanish, he told me, it’s that you speak with a broken accent.