The accent

I knew it from the other person's face, before I knew it from what I said.

I hadn't even finished the first sentence and it was already happening: that split second where the person in front of you listens, places you, and files you away. Argentine. Before knowing your name, before knowing what you came for, you're already that. The accent arrives first and speaks for you.

When you decide to emigrate to Spain from Argentina, there's one thing you tell yourself to stay calm: at least it's the same language. You think you've got that one covered. One less worry off a list that's already long.

Or so you think...

It's true that you understand everything and that people understand you. But it's not the same language. Sharing the words doesn't make you from there: it makes you an Argentine who talks funny, which is very different from being a foreigner who doesn't speak Spanish. Almost more uncomfortable, actually, because there's no excuse. If you didn't know the language, people would be patient with you. Since you do know it, what you have too much of shows, and what you're missing shows too.

And it's not just once. It's every day, with every person who hears you for the first time. You imagine that emigrating is one big, heavy procedure (the paperwork, the house, the job), and then you discover that what really reminds you you're away are the small things, the ones that keep repeating.

They place you in a second

In Argentina, the way I spoke said nothing about me, other than that I was from Córdoba or "from around there." It was the background, not the figure. Nobody listened to you "talk": they listened to you.

Here it's the first thing that comes up. You open your mouth in a meeting, at a bank, in the supermarket line, and the first thing people notice is your accent. The "Dale," the "Como va?," the way you eat the "s"es. Usually it's not pointed out with bad intentions. But every time it puts you in the same place: you're from outside, and it shows the moment you start talking.

The strange part is that the accent comes with a suitcase full of ideas that aren't yours. People already have a ready-made image of the Argentine before they meet you, and you show up inside that image whether you want to or not. Sometimes it works in your favor, sometimes against you. Never neutral.

Translating yourself from the inside

But what wears you out most isn't the accent. It's the constant translation you do in your head.

There are words I used my whole life that here mean something else, or mean nothing at all. After a couple of episodes like that, you learn to explain yourself in real time. You're talking and part of your brain is two words ahead, filtering out the ones that don't work, swapping "laburo" for "trabajo," weighing every bit of slang before letting it go, or explaining that "in Argentina, we say..."

You listen to yourself as if you were a translator sitting right next to you. It's invisible work that wears you down, because you have to make yourself understood, even though it's supposedly "the same language." By the end of the day you've been speaking in your own language the whole time, and you end up just as exhausted as if it had been in another one.

Do I soften it or not?

At some point you ask yourself the question for real: do I change the way I talk, or do I just live with it?

I know people who arrived and within two months already talk almost like locals. It's more comfortable, it saves you from some prejudices (not all), it opens fewer strange doors. I decided not to do it.

Mostly because, even though I'm here, I'm still from there. I'm still Argentine. With everything that implies. And that's what I want to keep being. Argentine. Here, there, anywhere. Argentine always.

The accent carries more than a sound. It carries where you're from, who taught you to speak, fifteen years of gatherings and asados and arguments in a language that was entirely yours. Giving all that up to sound like I'm from a place I don't belong to feels too much like erasing a part of what identifies me.

Where I am today

I don't know if I've ever fully felt like I'm from here. Many times I look for what I had back there and get frustrated when I can't find it. I try to adapt to the customs, the food, the way people relate to each other.

They say that after a while abroad your speech starts to blend: words slip out from one side and the other, and people from both places hear a trace in you that wasn't there before. If that's how it is, that's where the discomfort lies: you don't quite finish becoming from here, and you start to stop being from there, in the silliest and most real way there is, which is how your voice comes out without you even thinking about it.

It's part of the price. What I didn't know is that you pay it exactly there, in the place where you think you have nothing left to learn.

I don't have a neat ending for this. The accent stays. You learn to live with being placed before you even speak, with translating yourself or explaining yourself, with your own voice reminding you every day that you're far away.

If you're about to move to a country where your language is spoken and you think that part is already sorted: you've got it easier than others, that's true. But it's not sorted. I don't think anyone ever fully has it sorted.