hardboiled blog

While at a breakfast buffet during a recent family vacation in Cancun, my mom warily poked her fork at an odd-looking item on her plate and asked,

Mom: What is this?

Me: Oh, that’s a tamale.

Mom: Ta-Maui?

Me: Tamale.

Mom: Tamaui?

Me: No no no. It’s Ta. Mah. Li.

Mom: Ohh… tamale.

Dad: [looking up] Somali?

While the mispronunciation of words is nothing foreign to anybody who has attempted to learn a second language, my parents have certainly opened my ears to the wonders of pronunciation (or rather, mispronunciation). Most of the time, their slip-ups are mere phonetic intricacies, such as when they ask me how to set up a webcam with “Skypee” or mention that “cola bears” live in Australia—in these cases, I can easily recognize what they are saying and correct them promptly. But in the not-so-fortunate scenario, complete letters or syllables are dropped, and the resulting audible becomes a test in Scrabble. While we were in Cancun, my parents kept talking about an “o-bee-dian” souvenir that they wanted—it took me a long time before I finally figured out they wanted an obsidian statue. When my dad asked for a “car-uh-sun”, how could I know he wanted a Caprisun drink?

What intrigues me is that my parents’ mispronunciations don’t seem to be accent-related; my dad speaks seemingly perfect English, while my mom has a slight accent but is fluent in the language. But since they do speak solely Mandarin at home, my guess is that their reduced exposure to speaking English partly affects their ability to recognize the correct pronunciations of new words. I’m just glad my parents rarely encounter French words, with their silent ninja letters and all. They would certainly commit a verbal faux pas while trying to pronounce “faux pas”.