Everybody has an accent, oh unutterably silly one, at least everyone
else does.
When I was living out in California (or as I like to call it: The Left Coast of Darkness), I would regularly get the comments, usually within a few minutes of each other: "Oh, you're from Texas? You don't have much of an accent."
and, "Oh, you're from Texas? I can tell by the accent."
I find as I get older, my accent actually gets
more pronounced, and my speech patterns get more colloquial. Some things you just can't say without the accompanying accent, I suppose.
The funny thing is, I was born, and spent the first two years of my life in the hills of East Tennessee, then moved to Houston for the rest of my "growing up" years. According to my mother, I was saying complete sentences by about 18 months, so by rights, I ought to have an East Tennessee accent. But I
was raised by rampaging English teachers, so I guess the regular pronunciation-related beatings took, as I really don't have all that much of an accent, though I can adopt several that feel pretty natural more or less at will.
