I am one of the lucky ones.

Most volunteers aren't as lucky as me. I got my first choice of country placement, a country that speaks a language I already knew coming in. I had a pretty drastic head start in Portuguese, having lived in Brazil for 5 years and studied 3 semesters of Portuguese in college. There is no doubt in my mind that that fact saved me a lot of frustration and homesickness during the first few months of service.

That being said, Mozambican Portuguese has some pretty striking differences to Brazilian Portuguese. The best way I can describe it, without going Full-On-Linguistics-Dork, is that Mozambicans have the speech rhythm of Brazilians but the pronunciation of someone from Portugal -- with that extra dash of Bantu-influenced je-ne-sais-quoi. When I first got here, I never thought I'd never lose my precious Brazilian accent -- after all, I'd been hearing Brazilian Portuguese since I was a kid. The jury is still out on whether or not the Critical Period exists, but if it does, I'm pretty sure we can all agree that age 4 falls within that particular linguistic window.

"I don't think I'll ever lose my Brazilian accent," I told my friends during training, "I've been hearing it for so long. I can't unlearn it."

How wrong I was! Only three months later, I have come to a striking realization:

My Portuguese has become positively Mozambican.

Recently, as I was taking a walk through my community, I happened to meet one of the nuns that lives near the school. I talked with her for a few minutes, and got the distinct impression that, somehow, I already knew her. Something about the way she spoke struck me as familiar, even though this was our first encounter.

"I'm originally from Brazil." she said. "I come from Curitiba. But I have lived here for many years now."

I was so surprised! Excited, I told her that I had also lived in Brazil, and that I studied Brazilian Portuguese for many years.

"Really?" she said. "You don't sound Brazilian at all. You sound Mozambican."

Um... what?

I didn't really know what to think at first. I was flattered that she didn't say "You sound American," but I had felt so oddly proud of my Brazilian accent, and it was strange to hear that in a matter of weeks it had just... vanished.

But had it really vanished? That night, I turned on a Brazilian movie and closed my eyes and listened to it closely, taking in the Brazilian-ness of it. I wasn't really listening to what was being said, just letting the sounds bounce around inside my ears. After only a couple of minutes, I turned to a random page in my book and tried read aloud -- in Brazilian Portuguese -- and found it surprisingly easy.

So I've come to the conclusion that my Brazilian Portuguese has not vanished. It's still there, but I've made a conscious decision to tuck it away in a drawer. Yeah, it's kind of fun to sound like the people on the telenovelas, and it makes an interesting topic for conversation, but a huge part of integrating in my community here is the language, and it's going to make me that much more a part of my community if I sound like my Mozambican neighbors and not like a Brazilian expat. I am lucky to have a good ear for sound, and have the good fortune of having taken more than one phonetics class in college, so why not master Mozambican Portuguese as well as Brazilian Portuguese?

Now if only I could get a handle on Nyungwe... but that's a challenge for another day.