"I've Called 'em Tom-ah-toes All My Life and I'm Not Going to Change!": Maintaining Linguistic Control Over English Identity in the U.S.

This article explores how national identities are constructed through language by examining the accent negotiations of a group of white English immigrants to the U.S. Pointing to the anxiety that any Americanization of their accents engendered, I show how individuals cope with claiming an identity that seems to be undermined by their speech style. They negotiated this contradiction in two ways: first, they feared that an invisible audience of English people would unmask them as not properly English; and second, they used distancing mechanisms -- namely, sarcasm, disgust, anxiety about disloyalty, and a recourse to physicality -- to distance themselves from the Americanisms that crept into their linguistic habitus. These mechanisms allowed the immigrants to maintain their sense of Englishness even when they did not sound English.