My Yoruba Accent

   I wrote that i would write about the accent i used to have HERE and here it is. Growing up i got used to people assuming different things about me just from my appearance. The usual assumption being that I'm a classy, ajebutter kid, that jets out of the country on a regular and eats fancy stuff like pies, fruit cakes and the rest, but as a kid who grew up in Ekiti (not exactly a very developed state even by my standards) almost all their assumptions were wrong. As a kid who grew up in Ekiti, I barely even visited Lagos or any other state for that matter, not to talk of going out of the country. And i only saw stuff like pizza, pie, fruit cakes and the likes on TV, but i have always been classy and a little ajebutterish probably due to the fact that i watched a lot of foreign TV growing up, and my parents barely let my siblings and I  play with the street kids.

   I schooled mostly in Ekiti and its environs over the years, from primary school to junior secondary school, and there i was always one of the cool, classy, ajebutter kids but on moving to a school in Ibadan for my first class in senior secondary I realized i had an accent. At the first glance everyone still assumed the regular things, but once i opened my mouth and words came out, they started to think otherwise, unknown to me over the years i had picked up a Yoruba accent, and due to the fact that i was around fellow people with accents over the years i never noticed, amongst them i sounded like the classy one.


   That year wasn't exactly much fun for me. Do you know how annoying it is being the new kid with the accent? And not a foreign accent either cuz that would have been cool. I was rarely taken seriously because i was short and had a small frame, and also cuz of my accent (mostly cuz of the accent). I was laughed at, and i was usually the center of jokes and all. At a point i thought the senior girls were very fond of me since they kept calling me to talk to them, and they were always laughing, I later found out they were laughing at my accent and not that i was a funny guy. Not like there was a cool kids group but if there was i definitely was far from being a part of it. I later learned to control my accent but my mates didn't stop making fun of me, they changed every word that came out of my mouth into an accent filled statement (Tough times).

   In the end everything dies down, and so did my accent issue. I once again assumed my classy kid role and all the jokes about the accent i had once upon a time died almost completely, but as always there's always that one friend that doesn't want it to die (Lateef). Anyone who knows me now probably can't imagine me with an accent and it just goes to show that people can change (don't get me wrong though i was still classy just had a funny accent).