#bidialectism

Bidialectism: the fluctuations in one's speech and grammar contingent upon his/her current geography; the ease with which one's dialect shifts, in the same language, according to what region he/she occupies at a given moment. I have a habit of, shortly after arriving home from work and trading in the morning's flour-dusted black American Apparel leggings for my "at-home-and-all-alone" black American Apparel leggings, plunking myself onto the red couch in our living room and spending hours Wikihopping. You know, that delightful activity in which you conduct a simple search on Wikipedia -- say, on blood oranges -- and end up, inexplicably, on a page about how the literary trope of the superfluous man/Byronic hero is exemplified, in Russian literature, by the character of Eugene Onegin, of the eponymous novel in verse by Pushkin...and having read through/been redirected to at least 22 different Wikipedia pages in the process. All of a sudden, it's dusk and you've developed one SERIOUS case of ass cramp. Small joys, simple pleasures. This afternoon's Wikihop started with Levantine cuisine (which is completely reasonable a search, given my employment at an eating establishment specializing in said fare), and ended up at Gillian Anderson's biography. Though I wasn't nearly cool enough to be interested in the X-Files during its initial run on cable (I was more inclined to Sabrina, The Teenage Witch), I was always drawn to Ms. Anderson's glacial beauty, all fine bone structure and fiery red hair. She and Shirley Manson have always captivated me in such a way that, for a time, I cursed my Bangla-brown skin and black hair, heart aching to be a pale, blue-eyed redhead. But I digress. What struck me about Gillian Anderson's Wikipedia page was this phenomenon of bidialectism: Anderson grew up with an English father and an Irish-German mother. She spent her formative years in the U. K. and then, at the age of 11, moved to the U. S. Midwest. To this day, depending on where she is -- the U.S. or the U. K. -- her accent and dialect change accordingly. I found this entirely fascinating. This phenomenon, to me, can either work for her or against her...or does it do both all at once? Is she conscious of how her use of English changes depending on which side of the Atlantic she's on? The article mentions how, growing up in the States, she was made fun of for her English accent and what I assume were regional speech idiosyncrasies, to the point of flattening her speech to sound more "American"...does this allow her greater fluidity in terms of how she conceives of her national/ancestral identity? Personal identity? Does this ability (this quirk? this condition to which she is utterly helpless? this guise so careful, so calculated?) she possesses mask any lingering insecurity of foreign-ness/Otherness? Or does the fact that she possesses this bidialectism magnify her Otherness? Is Gillian Anderson always alien? IS SCULLY AN X-FILE UNTO HERSELF???