004: On Language, Accent, and Dialect as Placemaking
How a DC Accent in Hawaii Brought Me Home When I Was Living in Oakland, CA
Can home be a sound?
I didn’t expect to find home in Maui. I was there celebrating a friend’s milestone birthday, surrounded by the soft chaos of a vacationing crowd—the hum of the ocean, the clink of ice in glasses, the ambient laughter of strangers. It was paradise.
And then I heard the voice.
I felt unmoored. My body was in Hawaii, my mailing address was in Oakland, my heart was in Philadelphia, but my sense of home was an unanswered question.
A tall guy with an easy laugh, said something from across the pool, and I was struck by his accent. A deep DC accent, thick and rhythmic, with that unmistakable blend of Southern warmth and Northern bite. His words seemed to float through the air and wrap around us all, both foreign and familiar, like hearing your name in a crowded room.
For a moment, I wasn’t in Maui anymore. I wasn’t even in my own body. I was a teenager back in the DC area, a place I hadn’t called home in over a decade. His words became a portal, and the world around me rippled like a stone hitting water. I had to remind myself to focus, to actually hear what he was saying rather than getting lost in the sound of it. His accent was more than a regional inflection—it was a time machine.
It made me realize that language itself can be a form of placemaking; a way to feel at home, even when nowhere feels like home.
Growing up, I always thought DC accents sounded Southern but with a sharper edge. Definitely not New York, more northern than Richmond, where I was born, but still dipped in the drawl of the Mason-Dixon. There was a particular music to it, a cadence that felt both familiar and elusive, a kind of call and response with my own memory. It felt like placemaking—not just building physical space but crafting belonging through sound, through the lilt of language that tells you: You are here. You are home.
DC accents stretch vowels and cut off endings. And just like that, I was back in the DMV neighborhoods where I grew up, the Metro stations, the sound of go-go pulsing from car windows. I remembered the go-go’s where we’d had to remove buckled belts for entry.
Years later I am realizing: language is a place.
Some of us move so much that we don’t have accents anymore. Some of us never had one to begin with. Some of us carry multiple dialects, switching them like keys, unlocking or locking doors depending on who’s listening. Geneva Smitherman describes Black Language as being “bound up with and symbolic of identity, camaraderie, culture, and home.”1 That resonates. Today, as I write, I wonder:
If language is a form of placemaking, then what happens when we lose our mother tongues, our dialects, the sounds that root us?
If an accent can transport us, does that mean speech holds geography?
If code-switching is a survival tool, then where does it place us—and where does it exile us from?
Keith Gilyard reminds us that “the ability to move back and forth among languages, dialects, and registers with ease” is demanded by the social situation.2 I think about how often that movement is not just linguistic but spatial. How code-switching positions us differently, how it can offer safety but sometimes at the cost of feeling at home.
I don’t know if I have an accent anymore. I don’t know if I need one. But I do know that sometimes, place isn’t where you stand—it’s how you sound, how you’re heard, how you recognize yourself in someone else’s voice.
Placemaking is often associated with architecture, with physical spaces and urban landscapes. It is about transforming environments into containers for memory and community. But what if place is not just a location but a sensation? What if place lives in sound waves, in the vibrations of a dialect, in the rhythm of speech that builds an invisible shelter around you?
I had been searching for home. I wanted Oakland to feel like home, and yet, nearly ten years in, I still felt like a visitor. During the pandemic, that feeling of displacement only grew. The walls of my apartment were technically mine, but they never really felt like they were. And there I was, in a vacationing space, surrounded by friends, still unable to shake the sense that I was floating—unanchored and out of place.
I wondered if all expats feel this way. If hearing the sound of home in a foreign place always hits this hard. If it always feels like the ground beneath you shifts, even when you’re standing on something as solid as volcanic rock. Ironically, now I live in DC again. I hear these accents often now but I still recognize his specific accent when I connect with my friend group. And yes, it still brings me back to the thought that home can exist in sound waves as much as in bricks and mortar.
For Black people in this country, finding home is its own complicated journey.
The weight of displacement is historical, ancestral—a legacy of being uprooted and resettled, over and over. Language, too, carries the imprint of that rupture. Dialects, accents, even mother tongues have been lost, suppressed, or code-switched for survival. Yet, in those shifts, there are traces of place—sonic markers of who we are and where we’ve been. Placemaking, in this sense, becomes an act of resistance, a way to insist on belonging in a world that often denies it. And sometimes that act is as simple as recognizing the echo of home in someone else’s voice.
My body was once home to a human before he was born. Even now, almost seven years later, I know I am still home to my son in so many ways. I am the place he returns to when he is hurt, when he is tired, when he needs to feel safe, when he desires the cuddles only a mother can provide. I wonder if I am home to myself in the same way. I am trying to be. I want to believe that this body is my true home, that I am actually home wherever I go.
When I think back to that moment in Maui, I see it as a reminder that home is not always a place on a map. It can be a sound, a dialect, a melody that reminds you of who you are and where you’ve been. It can be a form of placemaking that transcends geography, that weaves home into the fabric of wherever you find yourself.
So, can home be a sound?
Yes. Home can be the bass of a DC accent echoing through a Hawaiian breeze, grounding me in the place I was, the places I’ve been, and the place I am becoming. Home, I realize, is not always a destination. Sometimes, it’s a frequency already vibrating beneath you—you just have to listen close enough to recognize it.
Reflection Prompt: Think of a time when a voice, a phrase, or an accent transported you somewhere. Where did it take you?
Smitherman, Geneva. Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Gilyard, Keith. Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.