Many languages have very distinctive sounds that allow us to recognize the language even though we don’t speak it ourselves, and allow us to “fake” it by making those sounds, (which some of us do more effectively than others). Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Asian languages, (which I think probably blend together for most English speakers. Although I pride myself on the fact that I can identify Tagalog, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese. I can also differentiate those accents when the person is speaking English, especially Vietnamese.)
I want to hear what English sounds like to people who don’t speak it. What are the distinctive sounds and rhythms? Can a person who doesn’t speak English hear the difference between an American and a Brit? Can they hear New Yawkese or thick Southern? (Forrest Gump vs. Goodfellas, if they watch American movies with subtitles, vs. dubbed)
This is really interesting to me and I’d love to get the answer, especially since my own perception, as a native speaker, is that English does not actually have such a distinctive sound…we are all over the map with our sounds, partly because English is such a mash of other languages to begin with. Of course I know that I feel that way because I CAN speak it, so the sounds are very distinctive to me and have meaning, I realize that. But even so, when I listen to other languages, some of them sound like they couldn’t possibly have more than a few thousand words total in them, because the sounds are so repetitive. This is especially so of Chinese (whole lotta “ong” and “ow” going on…and hey, this is a people that, while there are more than a billion of them at last count, have about 100 surnames for everyone. Or so I’ve heard. So really, variety in the language doesn’t seem to be their specialty.)
Thinking about English sounds, nothing seems to jump out as so repetitive and distinctive that it must “id” English to non-speakers. If I had to make a guess, I would say that part of what non-speakers recognize as being very English is a lot of “s” “sh” “th” and “p” sounds. Am I right as far as that goes?
But I still wanna HEAR it. So…does anyone know where I can hear non-English speaking people pretending to speak English? Can any non-native speakers who remember what it used to sound like to them demonstrate how they perceived it before they spoke it? Care to send me an MP3 or point me to a YouTube?
I’m pretty sure that the English “r” sound is uncommon among languages, as are both voiced “th” and unvoiced “th”. “Sh” is a bit more common, but not much. So, to “fake” English, I would do four things:
Throw in a lot of “r’” and “th” sounds
Use a lot of sounds which are common among languages, but which English happens to use with an unusually high frequency. I think “s” and maybe “t” would be examples of this.
Use a lot of dipthongy vowels. That is, exaggerate how we do things like pronounce long “o” more like “ow”, and long “a” (that is, IPA “e”) as “ay”.
Exaggerate the cadence (stress pattern) of English – which isn’t as rule-bound or predictable as in many other languages, but does nonetheless have a certain rhythm, though I couldn’t describe it off the top of my head.
I guess she found both th sounds hard. She told me her whole family practiced saying th and one of the words they used a lot to practice was thunderbird.
I’ve heard many ESL learners mock the way English sounds to them. The salient aspect of the language for them are the vowels (beginners can’t even distinguish r- or l- coloring, though those contours, in fact, shape vowels). English vowels often seem to speakers of languages like Japanese, Spanish, Italian, etc., like a kind of “lazy mouth.” This is because English has at least 21 vowels (depending on which linguist you consult), many of which are lax, and many languages have less than ten–often all tense–so to them it sounds like English speakers are just “lazy,” and not tensing their vowels.
As for dialects within the English language, most variation takes place across vowels. This is why ESL learners have difficulty discerning the difference between the way a Californian says the word “five” and how a person from, let’s say, Mississippi might pronounce it, elongating the diphthong vowel to the point where it sounds almost like two separate syllables.
But when you hear a Spanish speaker imitate the way English sounds, it’s pretty funny.
I’ve described this one before: one day I was coming back from the Esperanto club, and reading a French comic (bédé, BD, bande desinée). Around me were people speaking in Ukrainian and Russian (it’s the neighbourhood I live in.) My mind was completely outside the English realm. I exited the subway and got on the bus and noticed a woman reading a paper in an unfamiliar language that appeared to be a weird and awkward mutant version of Dutch, with not as many vowels and a lot of D’s and T’s and H’s.
I had no idea what it meant. Suddenly something clicked in my brain, and I realized I was looking at the front page of the Toronto Sun newspaper… which is in English. But my brain had been operating in total non-English mode, and I saw the language as it appeared from outside.
So, I don’t know what English sounds like from outside, but I know what it looks like from outside. Quite an interesting experience.
Years ago, at some internernational students’ conference, we did a presentation on the different languages that were present, and had people draw a pattern when listening to each language (a pattern of rises and falls, like on a heart monitor). German’s was fairly regular but spikey, Spanish was very regular and rounded, (there were other languages too, but those’ll do for examples), and English was completely irregular, rounded at times, spikey at times, and occasionally looping back on itself. The peaks and troughs weren’t very deep or high, though - compared to some languages (especially tonal languages), English is relatively flat.
Only those who know English reasonably well notice the th sounds, though. You tend not to ‘hear’ a sound unless it’s either in your native language or you’ve been around it a lot through lessons or whatever.
both - we have neither sound in Dutch. But I don’t know if the plain fact that we don’t have those sounds makes them particularly ‘English-sounding’ to us. I think this has more to do with intonation patterns than with individual sounds. For instance, I think that esp. Americans just sound ‘loud’ to us. However, I can’t help you out here since I can’t remember listening to English without understanding it.
This video is kind of interesting ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRR_gKFT6ds ), because he makes up “words” in several languages. Not knowing Hebrew, or Cantonese, etc., I wouldn’t know. But they are just as much gibberish as his fake English at the beginning, which is very interesting to hear.
When I was teaching kids in Japan, the way they made fun of an English accent (btw I think their model for English is mostly American English, but I’m not sure, so I didn’t just call it an “American” accent) was to add an “r”-ish component to all the vowels. So konnichiwa would be pronounced in this faux accent as “krnrchrwrrrr”. (Always with the last syllable elongated like that…)
“Konnichiwa, boku wa Kurisu desu”* became:
“Krnrchrwrrrrrrr… brkr wrrrrr Krisrr drsh.”
When I myself–an American–imitated an American accent in this way, they thought this was hilarious. Though I can’t be sure they were laughing with me to any degree…
It’s the idea that English speakers tend to try to have stressed syllables all occur at equal intervals, while speakers of some other languages try to give equal time to each syllable. Attempts to bear out this hypothesis, however, have failed. See the article above for more info.
A tiny bit technical, but here’s another argument against the idea that English is stress timed.
Thanks to people like Mel Blanc most kids in America grew up being able to use mock accents when speaking regular english. Mock french, mock german, mock japanese, etc.
Do kids from other countries do this as well (speak their native tongue with mock foreign accents)? How do they sound? What does a Chinese teen speaking Chinese sound like trying to do it in a mock american accent?
Hard to describe so I guess video/audio would be appreciated.
The only time I’ve seen the Lion King was in Colombia, and there was a trio of characters in the film who spoke with a distinct Cuban accent. So I guess probably so.
I just found this kid ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLZhclvLbfI&feature=related ). Aside from being almost unbearably cute, he does seem to be doing something similar to what you describe? Seems like a lot of ‘r’ sounds. And loud .
The peaks and troughs weren’t very deep or high, though - compared to some languages (especially tonal languages), English is relatively flat.
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