As much as I experience uncertainty around French culture and tasks at my internship, I also have been confusing many French speakers on where my accent is from. I know that I do not have a very strong American accent when I speak French, nor do I attempt to speak in a “Parisian accent” (if it even still exists nowadays), but I thought I still had a generally English/non-French accent that could hint at me being American. Yet almost every time I meet someone while speaking French and they ask where I am from after picking up on my accent, I somehow unintentionally surprise them by saying that I am from the U.S.
Naturally, as someone who is very visibly Asian, it could be in part due to stereotyping. However, after having discussed my accent with various friends, colleagues, and the people I shock, I am starting to wonder if it could also be due to having an odd accent or from others simply not knowing enough varieties of French accents. I will have to continue collecting data on this during my trip.
The interaction typically unfolds as follows. I will speak French with another person for some time, and they will ask me where I am from because they pick up on an accent. When I state that I am from the U.S., that person will then respond with something like, “wait, really?” Naturally, they will explain that they believe my accent is not typically “American,” as in how American English speakers might stereotypically sound when speaking French. And then they will be even more confused when I tell them I only speak English and French, no other languages are in the mix to create my accent.
My accent to some people might be:
- Northern American/English, but not quite American English from the states
- Vaguely Asian? (This is where stereotypes play a role in the confusion)
- A little German????
I am not quite sure why this keeps happening, especially when I know I don’t make much of an effort to get rid of anglophone traits in my French speech, but it is a little entertaining. My host mom suggests that it could be a combination of stereotypes and people not knowing the intricacies of different French accents (like an American English accent that is not as strong as typical examples shown online or in school). Perhaps I will have a more descriptive list by the end of this trip.
On another note, my internship is filled with almost as much uncertainty and confusion in equally hilarious ways. Filled. From the building we work in, to the applications and technology we use, to my tasks and projects, there are so many curious and unclear directions and situations I have to deal with.
Beginning with the building itself, I have learned how to maintain the building and even open and close the museum all by myself (so far though, I have only needed to close the museum alone one time). It is such an old building, that the simple task of locking the doors and turning off the lights for the night feels like trying to solve a puzzle with a million pieces.
Oh, that door in the back? Yeah, you have to insert the key a little bit first, then turn it sideways before inserting it further, and then you can turn to lock it–and you of course have to retract it slightly and turn it before you can actually remove it again. Ah, those doors? Mhm, you can’t turn the key unless you hold the handle up (so the handle bar angles up instead of down). Don’t forget to turn these lights off individually, these ones off using a remote, and these ones by going to a wall opposite from them and finding the button hidden behind a display. Each day it feels like I learn how another door in the building unlocks or where a different mystery button is located.
The technology is not much easier to work with. I bring my own laptop because I prefer working on it, especially when the other laptops are in use, but it does not get along well with the hard drive used to transfer files over to our display computers. Every single time, I have had to go through several steps before I am able to safely eject the hard drive, and it is never the same thing that fixes the issue. I have since brought my own drive to use out of fear that this bug could lose the files on the museum hard drive one day.
Not to mention there is the main contact email for the museum, which I learned today is hosted through a weird site and that no one knows the password anymore. “We just leave the site open; don’t question it, it just works,” is roughly how my colleague explained it to me. Which is just about how most things there operate.
The hilarious complexity and confusion of my actual workplace and technology makes the uncertainty of my projects so much simpler in comparison. Most of the ambiguity here comes from not having enough data or not being satisfied with my search results and having to make the call myself instead of checking in every step of the way with my boss. If I am not satisfied with the information I am finding online, I have learned to make use of my contacts and creative skills to find an alternative solution.
For example, for one of my side projects, I am tasked with updating the maps and statistics for one of our displays. While I have found some updated data online, I am still trying to figure out how to simplify the information into a more readable table and find suitable maps of speaker proportions. The maps have had me especially stumped, as some look as though they may have been made by a previous intern using a map making program and a dataset on speakers of various languages. Thus, I am thinking about getting in contact with others back home who may know where I can find the simplified tables I am looking for online or who may be able to help me make updated versions of the maps.
With that one hard drive and how the building works though, I will definitely continue to use my own and ask when I forget how to manage our mysteriously built museum.
Here’s to puzzling experiences and weird historical buildings; I look forward to what the rest of my stay will continue to offer.
