That's the only way I can describe what I just saw.
I was watching a cooking show, Cucina Amore, and the two cooks they had were what could be best described as good ol' boy Italian-Americans. Very weird to hear someone speak in sort of stereotypically Italian-America way with a Texas drawl.
One of my friends said it was like listening to someone with a Southern drawl learning to speak Spanish.
I was The White Guy in my Swahili class in college -- all the others were American blacks, with varying degrees of Black Vernacular English accents. Since I'd been studying languages since I was a kid, I picked up a decent approximation of Swahili pronunciation on the first day. But the other people in the class didn't have much of a background in foreign languages, so that it was basically like listening to someone with a Southern drawl learning to speak Spanish.
Another kind of dissonance I hear reported is in seeing someone of a particular race speak with an accent or in a language that one never associates with that race. For example, I grew up in LA surrounded by Latinos who were basically working-class Northern Mexicans. Among my acquaintances there was Korean girl who grew up in Peru; and while Asians are quite common in Peru, none of the Mexican folks in LA had ever heard of such a thing, and so considered were dumbfounded to see her speak Spanish, as if they were watching an octopus amble down the street whistling a Brandenberg Concerto.
I also knew a guy named Harold who looked like just a random middle-class American black guy, and was from upstate New York, but whose dad was a black (black BLACK) Cuban; so Harold would speak English with the very sedate Manhattonesque articulation, and then switch into blindingly fast and fluid Cuban Spanish, with all the hand-waving and gesticulating that would put even a Roman to shame. While black people are not exactly rare in Cuba (quite the contrary), again none of the Northern Mexicans around me could cope with this. "But... he can't be... Latino! He's not from California or Mexico. And he's BLACK!!"
