Small town folks, are you ever taken back when you hear a foreign accent in your local store, bar etc?

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Wooden_Cold_8084@reddit

Not really. We were pretty diverse even early on. Something like 1/3 of our town's population of 600 back in like 1872 were Chinese

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From chicago, not a small town by any means, but depending on the accent it can be surprising. A guy walking a dog in my neighborhood was talking to his wife and he was dressed in an collared shirt and fancy sweater like he was about to go watch a polo match or something and he had the most insanely posh British accent I’d ever heard. Definitely did a double take.

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Fun_Frosting_6047@reddit

The only time I get shocked is when I hear a European, Australian, or South African accent.

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baalroo@reddit

I grew up in a small town where the people would generally not just be "taken aback" to encounter a foreign accent, but rather would be at best passive aggressive about it and might even just directly ask the person "what they think they are doing here" (or similar) and do their best to make it clear that the person is not welcome.

However, none of those people are the type of people who are going to be online in a community like this, open to answering questions about the US for foreigners. You kind find a lot of those exact people on facebook though, commenting things like "deport all of these criminals!" on any news article featuring anyone that isn't white.

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ChiSchatze@reddit

I think this depends on the area/region of the small town and language that was spoken.

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03zx3@reddit

Not usually, I get a lot of Hispanic folks year round and being on RT 66 we get a lot of touring Europeans and Australians in the summer.

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03zx3@reddit

Not usually, I get a lot of Hispanic folks year round and being on RT 66 we get a lot of touring Europeans and Australians in the summer.

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NerdWhoLikesTrees@reddit

Not at all. That’s super normal around me

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Soundwave-1976@reddit

Depends being close to Mexico we hear lots of Spanish accidents. It would be surprising to hear European ones though.

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Loud_Insect_7119@reddit

IDK, I've spent a lot of time in rural New Mexico and have met a bizarre amount of Europeans in them. Dutch and German especially for some reason, I think they tend to like the American west, lol.

I feel like it's more common in western small towns I've lived in than back east, though, for some reason. At least if you're living in a truly small town in a rural area. Like I've lived in what are technically small towns on paper in Illinois and Maryland where it wasn't uncommon, but those small towns were actually just suburbs of major cities so it wasn't a true small town experience.

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gerstemilch@reddit

You can thank Karl May for the Germans, he was a prolific author of western novels in the German language and fostered a deep interest in that region that persists in Germany to this day.

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Gilamunsta@reddit

Yeah, grew up with May, and yeah talking to cousins in Germany they're still fascinated by the American West 😁

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

The Italians go crazy over it, too. The spaghetti westerns were made for a reason.

Fun fact: the Italian comic book 'Tex Ritter' has had the world's second longest continuous run. Number one is 'Superman.'

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Granadafan@reddit

I took an Italian friend and his wife to the Grand Canyon with stops at a couple reservations. They were very disappointed that the people weren’t living in teepee or dressed in moccasins and painted faces. I told them the equivalent would me going to Rome (their hometown) and being disappointed that the locals weren’t in togas or in legionnaire clothing.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

that the locals weren’t in togas or in legionnaire clothing.

You can find those guys easy enough. But it's like Elmo in Times Square trying to shake you down for 5 bucks.

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Loud_Insect_7119@reddit

Oh yeah, I'm very familiar with the love Germans have for the American West. I used to be a wilderness guide for a company that catered to a lot of foreign tourists and I had such a love/hate relationship with Germans because of it, most of them are lovely but there were some who could be really obnoxious and even offensive about stuff that didn't match up with their idea of how things should be.

I had to be particularly careful with my German clients when we were around Native Americans, lol. I once got in a big argument with a client when we were driving through a reservation and he wanted to stop and take pictures like they were zoo animals or something, and I had to try to explain that, "No, this isn't a tourist area, these people will not appreciate you gawking at them," lol.

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Maronita2020@reddit

I grew up in the northeast of the U.S. in a small town just outside of a major city and it still was a REAL small town experience. Everyone knew everyone and people left their doors unlocked. You did NOT show an ID at the bank as it was expected that the employee KNEW who you were. About 10 years ago a major bank took over a bank there. The former bank employees were laid off and they brought in their own workers but they had to lay them off after the first week and hire the former bank employees back because residents REFUSED to provide ID's.

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cdsbigsby@reddit

I know it's a typo, but it's still funny to imagine a Spanish accident.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

I'm imagining a flamenco dancer tripping over her own feet and landing on the guitarist while a horse panics and bucks off the guy wearing a traditional riding outfit.

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Soundwave-1976@reddit

Sometimes I think auto correct is just messing with me.

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LukasJackson67@reddit

No

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enstillhet@reddit

No. I'm in a rural town but we have Greek, Chinese, Irish, Guatemalan, and probably other folks of other National origins here. Plus, although I'm from here and live here now I did live in a big city in my 20s for a while. These things don't faze me.

Usually if folks are speaking a language which I don't speak I'm listening to the phonology and trying to figure out which language it is.

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MrLongWalk@reddit

It depends on the accent, but usually no, even in small towns immigrants are by no means unheard of.

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Low-Cat4360@reddit

This is true. I live in what's might be more of a very tiny city than a small town (12k people), and I hear/ immigrants every single time I go out in public. Hispanic Latin Americans, Filipinos, and Chinese are the most common here.

I've also got an aunt who immigrated from England and a cousin who's married to a Brazilian immigrant. Even met Hungarian immigrants here before, and I hear German every now and then.

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yesIknowthenavybases@reddit

Also worth noting is that many of those rural small towns started as immigrant communities in the 1800’s. And those vestiges of their former culture still live on.

There’s literally a town in Missouri named Rhineland.

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Ambitious-Sale3054@reddit

Exactly! I grew up in a small southern town but there was a military base near by and a some of my childhood friends moms were from Germany,Japan,Korea,Italy and England. What’s really funny is hearing a southern accent coming from someone that is clearly Asian!

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Recent-Irish@reddit

Once in my grandmother’s town (500 people in rural Texas) I heard someone with a German accent and I wanted to ask “what the fuck are you doing in bumfuck, Texas?”

Also has an Indian family asked me for “sightseeing” recommendations… at a gas station in Iowa. Glad you guys are driving around here but why did you choose to vacation in Iowa?

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Carrotcake1988@reddit

Where in Texas??

Because Texas German is a legit dialect.

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Ununhexium1999@reddit

I had a professor from Indonesia who wanted to go to college somewhere in the middle so he’d be close to everything…so he ended up at Iowa State

Maybe they just didn’t realize how big the USA is

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satansboyussy@reddit

They were 100% passing through on a road trip haha

I managed to find Buddy Holly's crash site in Iowa going from Badlands NP back east towards home lol

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sinesquaredtheta@reddit

Also has an Indian family asked me for “sightseeing” recommendations… at a gas station in Iowa.

LOL where in Iowa was this?

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Recent-Irish@reddit

Somewhere between Davenport and Council Bluffs.

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The_Bjorn_Ultimatum@reddit

.... so somewhere in Iowa, lol.

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Recent-Irish@reddit

Yeah I suddenly felt an urge to piss and pulled over at the first station I saw.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

Glad you guys are driving around here but why did you choose to vacation in Iowa?

They came to this sub asking for advice, and 8 different people told them to "skip New York and the Grand Canyon and go see the real America!"

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cdb03b@reddit

There were a lot of German Immigrants to Texas, in particular central Texas. So outside of site seeing or moving to the area, they could be visiting extended family.

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The-JSP@reddit (OP)

🤣🤣 I love exploring and some of my fondest memories of the US are enjoying a few drinks in a small town bar (usually on business travels and most of the plants are in the rural Midwest) with a few semi-intrigued locals.

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Calculusshitteru@reddit

I'm from Seattle, and people were always taken aback by my mom's Boston accent lol.

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Big_Metal2470@reddit

I grew up in a rural area. I was really surprised when I heard an accent that wasn't an American or Mexican accent. It turned out the German Air Force had opened up a training program nearby. I was pretty happy though. I got to practice my German. Otherwise, the only foreign accents I heard were exchange students and Korean wives of soldiers. That was, uh, pretty common.

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stefiscool@reddit

Two square miles here, and nope, since the town broke off from the neighboring town in the 1950s it’s been a lot of Polish immigrants (including my grandparents). There’s now other Eastern European countries, Latin American countries, some Middle East, and then those of us who grew up here. So a lot of accents are mo surprise.

Now if it was a British or Irish accent, that’d be a little surprising

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shelwood46@reddit

For Irish accents you have to go down the shore, where half the staff every summer is over from Ireland.

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GrunchWeefer@reddit

You live in Jersey. Our small towns are not what people mean by "small town".

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Muderous_Teapot548@reddit

I was kind of caught off guard when I first moved out of the city to this town by the sheer number of Chinese immigrants (I recognized the Beijing accent, it's very distinct). There is a Chinese owned company on the outskirts of town. Made perfect sense after that.

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c1m9h97@reddit

This is the reverse but when I lived in Italy, I was dating a man who lived in the English countryside and when I would visit, they would be surprised by my accent. In London (where I also lived later on), people did comment on my accent and assume I was a tourist but in the countryside it was a big shock.

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kingjaffejaffar@reddit

I’m taken aback when I hear an accent from 10 miles down the road.

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JulesChenier@reddit

I am from a big US city. Back in the 90's i met someone online that lived in a small (400 population) town in rural Mississippi, so I traveled there to meet her.

I was that foreign accent in the local store, even though I wasn't foreign and spoke English.

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1979tlaw@reddit

I live in a town of 500 and Honestly only if they’re white. We have lots of immigrants. Hispanics, Asian, islanders, African. Doesn’t shock me when they have an accent.

However I’m usually caught off guard by an Eastern European accent every time.

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iamcarlgauss@reddit

I live in a town of 500

We have lots of immigrants.

My friend, you don't have lots of anyone.

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1979tlaw@reddit

lol. Fair. Lots relative to the population.

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papercranium@reddit

Nah. There's a college town just across the river, and they get folks from all over there.

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obtusername@reddit

So, without sounding too racy -

It’s not unexpected when the person “looks” foreign, ie “oh wow, clearly middle-eastern dude speaks with middle-eastern accent, whaddya know?”

In my experience, I’m really the most surprised by British accents, as they looks like any other person, black or white, until they start speaking.

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yesIknowthenavybases@reddit

For understandable reasons we don’t get a lot of European immigrants and that throws me off the most.

Like yeah, not gonna be phased at all that the Indian guy has an Indian accent. I was not anticipating my new neighbor to have a Swedish accent when we started chatting lol.

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G00dSh0tJans0n@reddit

Yeah same. Like when I was meeting up on my friend's farm to shoot some guns and make a bonfire and our other friend brings his college roommate with him and we're surprised he has an Australian accent and we're like, dude, you brought Crocodile Dundee with you?!

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satansboyussy@reddit

That was my experience with a white guy from Zimbabwe! He made us guess where he was from and no one could. I was like, South Africa? No? Uh... Namibia? No?!?

But he looked like Steven from Walmart

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Picklesadog@reddit

I was at a college party in Arizona back in the day with a British friend. We were talking to some guy, and he asked if my friend was British. When my friend said yes, the guy immediately switched to an Australian accent. He had moved to the US as a young teen but had to lose the accent due to bullying.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

If the guy's in my age bracket, he would have spent much of his childhood hearing "dingos ate me baby!" Not trying to be a smart-ass, that was was like a mid 1980s pre-internet meme. Elementary school kids (and older) all over America were repeating it. 95% of them didn't know the actual (fucked up) story.

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Picklesadog@reddit

It would have been early 2000s.

There are tons of other "shrimp on the barbie" type jokes he would have heard.

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Brad3366@reddit

Living in the Bay Area, wouldn’t even think twice if I heard someone speaking with an accent

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schmelk1000@reddit

Not really “taken aback” more confused why you’re in my small podunk town. But thanks for stopping by.

I’ve always liked listening to accents, foreign or not.

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Upset-Shirt3685@reddit

If it’s anything other than Spanish, I would be shocked and definitely speak to the person.

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Sadimal@reddit

Not really.

I live within 30 miles of the naval shipyard and a popular tourist destination. Plus we're right off of the highway so we get a lot of folks stopping for food and gas.

Not to mention I'm surrounded by state forests and campgrounds.

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Almajanna256@reddit

nope I've heard all the accents at this point

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TheBimpo@reddit

No, we get plenty of tourists all summer.

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Designer_Head_3761@reddit

I can immediately tell if someone isn’t originally from my county

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Wonderful-Poetry1259@reddit

I live in a village of 5000 people. It never bothers me one bit to hear different accents. Why should it? Just because one lives in a small town doesn't mean one has a small mind.

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Sirhc978@reddit

It is more of a sense of confusion. Like, buddy, you better be here for business or visiting family because there is no way you decided to vacation here. We're like 2 hours from anything worth seeing.

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ColossusOfChoads@reddit

You don't have pretty trees to look at?

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Individual_Corgi_576@reddit

He’s from South Dakota. They only have the one tree.

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Technical_Plum2239@reddit

I live in a rural area in Mass. We still have hundreds of accents nearby. Polish, Armenian, Syrian, Indian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Brazil, Chiese.. but I would be mildly surprised if I heard one like Irish, British, Australian.

Not unheard of for sure, but not the regular folks that immigrate here and I'm in Massachusetts flyover zone. We get lots of tourists in Mass but not my area. There are sexier places to go than my rural spot here.

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willtag70@reddit

I live in a good sized metropolitan area but it's still rare to encounter British accents for example, and when I do it's always amusing. "Taken aback" isn't how I would put it, more entertaining. Encountered a British lady in the wine aisle at the grocery store the other day. It just kind of lights up a bunch of extra neurons when someone who looks typical starts speaking with a strong British/Aussie/Kiwi accent. Usually you can tell before they speak with Latinos or East Asians so the surprise factor doesn't kick in.

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notyogrannysgrandkid@reddit

Yes (see my flair)

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Irak00@reddit

I’d only be surprised if it was a black or white person with a foreign accent which has only happened twice. I expect & know the Mexican & Chinese at the restaurants & the Indians & Pakistanis at the gas stations, liquor stores, etc to have accents.

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DrGerbal@reddit

Live north of Birmingham Alabama. Had a guy with a British accent take my order at rock n roll sushi. And it fucked my brain up real bad. I had to like pause in my head say “really?” Than get my sushi

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NathanEmory@reddit

Just depends on the accent tbh. Rural Ohio you hear lots of accents so we're used to hearing Latin American, Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Caribbean accents. If I heard a European, Slavic, or Oceanic accent I would turn my head though

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Irak00@reddit

Depends- I expect the Pakistani & Indians running the gas stations, liquor stores, etc to have accents but anyone else I’d be surprised

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Fit_Serve6804@reddit

I moved to the South from the Midwest. Anything that's not a Southern accent is foreign to them lmao. Instantly "othered" even though I'm from Ohio less than 9 hours away. But we do have lots of migrant workers from Mexico in the area due to a large agriculture industry. I never bat an eye but I'm sure my peers do.

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Deedeelite@reddit

I grew live in Florida so accents don't phase me. It's neat to hear but it usually just ends there.

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FormerlyDK@reddit

No, my small town gets a lot of tourists. It’s got a great Main Street.

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Mental_Freedom_1648@reddit

My town gets lots of migrants passing through for farm work. So it's not unusual.

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Bluemonogi@reddit

I live in a town of about 3,000 people in a rural area in the middle of the US. We are not a college town or get tourists here much so it is a surprise to hear a foreign accent.

There was a guy at the doctor’s office when I was there earlier this year from South Africa talking to the receptionist and trying to figure out American insurance. Another time there was a German couple at an out of the way museum in rural Kansas. I guess they were interested in Native American history.

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stay_with_me_awhile@reddit

It depends on where they’re from. There are quite a few people from Spanish speaking countries in my area, so I’m used to hearing it. However, I live not too far from an army base and once or twice a year they’ll open it to civilians and have base-wide garage sales. Once when I was a kid, I went to the sales and there was one man who was having a sale and his wife was from England and I was just MESMERIZED. I had never heard an English accent in person before and I just stood there and talked to her for what seemed like hours just so I could listen to her speak 🤣 she was so nice too, she had an antique glass ink bottle for sale that she told me came from an excavation site in her hometown and she let me have it for free. I still have it sitting on my dresser all these years later. 💛

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The-JSP@reddit (OP)

What a great story, thanks for sharing (:

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evil_burrito@reddit

Yes. I was sitting at the counter at our local tractor supply store waiting for my order to be filled. I heard a dude with an Australian accent behind me asking for some help with his tractor.

I had questions. I wanted to ask them. I did not.

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Vexonte@reddit

Yes. I'm mostly curious why they are specifically in my neck of the woods and not in places like New York or LA, where most foreigners actually know about rather than a small farming town with a steel cutting factory near by.

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whatsthis1901@reddit

Not really I live an easy day drive to both Tahoe and Yosemite so my small town gets its fair share of tourists during the summer and in winter we have a lot of people from Australia working at the ski resort so they will drive down to get food at our local store.

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Vachic09@reddit

I am from a moderately small town. I am taken aback by most foreign accents, but Mexican and Guatemalan don't phase me at all.

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Untamedpancake@reddit

I grew up in a town of about 10,000 people in a very isolated part of Michigan, the UP (Upper Peninsula, surrounded by three Great Lakes) & that town is one of the largest in the area. The 3 hour road trip to Green Bay, Wisconsin was the closest "big city" (population about 100,000)

Growing up there in the 80s the majority of foreign accents I encountered were from doctors who were completing their "rural medicine" residencies.

I moved to an even smaller town, still in the UP, but where tourism is the main industry. The incredible natural scenery & outdoor recreation draws people from all over the world year round so it's pretty common to hear different accents & languages.

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Picklesadog@reddit

My wife and I were road tripping across the US and stopped in a tiny town in Virginia for an early lunch/late breakfast. My wife convinced me to go to the town's Chinese Buffet ("Seriously? You want to get Chinese food HERE?") My wife is Korean.

When we sat down, the owners came to say hi. They were so happy we came and were thrilled beyond belief to meet another Asian person. They told us the local gas station was owned by a Korean family.

After that, one by one every employee, even the dishwasher, came to the table to say hello. It was very sweet.

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TillPsychological351@reddit

Not at all. I've lived in foreign countries before, so I was the "foreign accent" at one time.

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HorseFeathersFur@reddit

Very Small town in Tennessee, a UK couple came in to a family owned bakery/cafe and when those folks heard the accents, the entire cafe (patrons and employees) came over to welcome them, ask them about their holiday, and take pictures with them lol. They don’t get many tourists in that area.

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Highway_Man87@reddit

Not really. We had a lot of migrant farm families from Mexico and Texas that settled in my small town, and I had a couple friends whose parents barely spoke English.

We also had a smaller influx of Somali refugees from the twin cities area, and a couple of the doctors at our local hospital were from countries in Africa or the Middle East.

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Poprhetor@reddit

*aback

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badger_on_fire@reddit

I'm a Floridian in a small town in the general vicinity of the Mouse, so no. At least not anymore.

Seems a lot of folks are starting to stay further and further away from tourist town, and get a real sense of what Florida's actually like. It's nice to know that our penchant for telling on ourselves (i.e., the Sunshine Laws that created the myth and legend known only as "Florida Man") are actually getting second thoughts from folks outside of the US.

Now... if we could just get the rest of Americans to believe that, the world will be ours for the taking. The alligator would become the new national bird and you will be mandated to ride one to work by 2035.

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Parking_Low248@reddit

No. This is a small town rural area, but is popular with people not originally from the US. Not terribly far from NYC and a lot of people end up here if they want to leave full time city life. Met a guy originally from Australia at my morning coffee spot a few weeks ago, he lives here full time now. Plenty of Russian and Eastern European people around here too.

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the-godpigeon@reddit

I'm originally from Houston, TX and eventually retired a few states away in a rural town literally as small as the neighborhood that I grew up in. It's close to a military base so it's not at all difficult to blend in with a different accent.

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No_Pineapple_9205@reddit

No, even though it's a small town, we have a large Polish population, and the town next to us has a large Latino population. To be fair, though, l grew up in a big city with lots of immigrants, so it's nothing new to me.

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Jumpy-Cranberry-1633@reddit

No, our small town is a popular place to visit due to its small town charms.

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Mountain_Air1544@reddit

Not really no my home town is tiny but surrounded by hiking trails and tourist destinations

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SchuckTales@reddit

Not really. There are all sorts of different ethnic / cultural differences even in small town western New York. There are large populations of Central Americans Hispanics, Indian and Pakistani, and Dutch and German speaking people in the area.

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iloveyourforeskin@reddit

I'm just instantly curious and want to know how their life brought them to this random ass little town.

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hypo-osmotic@reddit

Taken aback isn't quite the right term for it but I will spend a minute wondering why they might be here. There's a highway running through town though so the most common explanation is that they're just stopping for fuel or food on a road trip

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ProfessionalAir445@reddit

I don’t live in a small town but I am always surprised by a British accent, lol. I heard one in the kind of shitty corner store in my neighborhood the other day and I absolutely reared around like “what the fuck are you doing here?”

We have lots of immigrants, just not many from Europe. Tourists only come here if they are super into airplanes.

I heard some accents in the nice mall by the Air Force base the other day but that wasn’t that surprising, being the nice mall by the Air Force base. I guess it’s really just in shitty little corner stores in my urban neighborhood that it’s surprising.

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breaker_1986@reddit

No, my town was settled by immigrants for Sweden, Norway, Portugal, and Italy. Many of my town's inhabitants found their way to the US after World War two.

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Rhomya@reddit

Taken aback is not the phrase I would use.

It’s more like… bewilderment?

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Danny69Devito420@reddit

My Grammy was the one in the small town with the accent. I remember growing up she was constantly asked where she was from. But never anything rude, just curiosity because I am sure they had never heard a Dutch accent before.

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psychocentric@reddit

It's noticed, but I wouldn't say we are "taken back." We're a country of immigrants, so accents are around us most of the time. Someone nosey might ask where you're accent is from to start a conversation, but I don't feel like someone around here would be shocked.

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