I’m questioning the pronounciation of words ending with -ich, mainly ich itself. People tell me the ch is supposed to be pronounced like in ach and noch and I’ve heard it like that. However, in the German music I have (mainly Rammstein), they pronounce it like isch. A German guy told me Rammstein basically have their own pronounciation. However I have a song by a German duo, something Witt and something Heppner, called Die Flut where they pronounce it isch as well, so it has to be more than just the German version of Snoop Doggy Dogg’s -izzle speak. Is it slang or a regional dialect or what? A friend and I are curious.
Regional dialectical fun=)
I have a friend who is bavarian, and another who is from somewhere near Berlin, and even I can tell a difference when they talk=)
Are you saying that’s the reason for the differences, or just making an observation? I would agree though. It’s not too difficult to tell someone from France from someone from Quebec. This seems to be completely within one country though, and I wouldn’t think dialects would vary that much.
My german is absolutely horrid, but the way I understand it is that there are two major…‘dialects’ of german. High german and low. One pronounces “Ich” more or less the way it’s spelled and the other pronounces it like Rammstein does. My grandparents give each other a hard time over this regularly: one speak high and the other speaks low. (IIRC, my grandma speaks high and sometimes makes jokes about how she can’t understand ‘that horrible accent’ my grandfather has.)
Rammstein are from somewhere in eastern Germany, and in their dialect “(i)ch” is pronounced like “sh”, and their r’s are heavily rolled in the front of the mouth.
Ha. Listen to someone from Yorkshire, and someone from Devonshire, and see if you still think this way.
I believe this is not so much related to dialect as to make certain German sounds more melodic and easier to sing. I remember being forced to do this while singing German songs for choral competition… as you said, the “ch” becomes “sh” and the guttural R becomes a trilled R. In other words, they encourage exactly the prounounciations that are actively discouraged in German class. Why? I have no idea.
[ish] as a pronounciation if ich is a feature of a number of dialects from the most western regions of Germany/the Rhineland, also of a French accent in German. The standard pronounciation is [ikh], as in ach, noch, etc. LEO has .wav files for a lot of German expressions.
There are at least two basic types of “ch” in German. Actually you could make the case that there are even three, but two of them are so close that we can safely ignore the distinction. After “a”, “o” and “u” you have a so called voiceless velar (or uvular) fricative, the same sound that is in “ach”, “noch” and “doch”. After “e”, “i” and the diphthongs you have a so called voiceless palatal fricative that is noticeably different. It is not really common in English, but e.g. it’s the consonant that many speakers pronounce at the start of “huge”. This one is a bit closer to “sh”, but in standard German it’s not the same.
The German digraph <ch> represents two different sounds, depending on the vowels before or after it. When next to a back vowel (a, o, u), it’s pronounced [[symbol]c[/symbol]] with a velar scrape in the back of your mouth, as in Bach.
But when it’s with a front vowel (e or i), its sound is an unvoiced open palatal fricative, [ç] in IPA. This sound is where you hold your tongue in the middle of your mouth with the tip just behind your alveolar ridge, in the position to say the [j] sound of y as in yes, but instead of articulating a [j] glide, you just hold that position and push air through it.
Yes, it does sound almost like a “sh” sound to the ears of English-speakers (the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, pronounces his name with a very English “sh” sound at the end). It’s pretty close to “sh” but still not the same sound.
It’s actually the same sound as Korean “hy” as in Hyundai.
Clarification… that was not to say that the pronounciation you described doesn’t exist in certain German dialects. I recall only that there is a certain prescribed way of singing German that differs from standard spoken German and is not due to dialectic differences.
I’d ask the German/Choral teacher who explained this to me, but unfortunately he’s dead.
That is interesting. So that pronounciation isn’t incorrect or slang, it’s just regional. Either that or it’s melodical. I can understand that because Japanese pronounce things differently in music than when singing. So basically since I learned German pronounciation mainly from music, I should sing in German if I want to speak it. That should provoke an interesting response from people.
I would be interested to know more about that.
It provokes me to say “what in the world is that supposed to mean?” If you were to speak German with the pronounciation that is normally used in sung German, it would sound odd because you would be speaking simultaneously in several dissimilar accents. On the other hand, if you walked around singing it, you’d just seem like a nutcase.
Well, Till Lindemann is from Leipzig, and the local dialect (Saechsisch) does indeed pronounce the “ch” in ich as “sch”. In fact there is a famous little poem in Saechsisch which goes:
Sitzt ein Wuermchen auf dem Tuermchen mit einem Schirmchen
but is pronounced more like:
Sitzt en Woermsche auf em Toermsche met em Schoermsche
Other German dialects that pronounce “ich” like “isch” are Hessian, Pfaelzisch and Koelsch. In Bavaria and Schwaben they use “i” (pronounced “ee”). In Plattdeutsch they says “ik”, and in Berlin they say “ikke”.
As you can see there are many varations on how to say “me” in German.
Well for instance, in Japanese, when a u follows a non-gutteral consonent (like k, f, and s, not g, z, or j) unless it is doubled, it is hardly pronounced. This isn’t true in music. Also, double vowels are often pronounced as two syllables instead of one longer one. Likewise, the letter n at the end of a syllable (in romaji) nasalizes the vowel in normal speech, but in songs, it’s usually pronounced as a seperate syllable. Excuse my loose terminology.
That’s basically what I was getting at. I know best the pronounciation used when singing, so I better sing anything I have to say, though people will think oddly of it. I don’t really know enough German to form many coherent sentences so it isn’t likely I’ll be conversing in the language anyway. I was just trying to make a funny.
I think that’s as relevant of an answer as can be given. I have to ask, if anyone knows, are there any differences between the pronounciation when Till is singing and the pronounciation of his home land?
I worked for a couple of years with a multinational company in Germany and heard a range from a (what I’ll call) very soft “ch” (Ich = eesch) to a very hard “ch” (Ich = eekh). Rammstein tend more to the soft end of the scale. There’s a song, Ich bin wieder hier that got heavy play when I lived there by a singer called Westernhagen, that pronounced the Ich fairly hard. So it’s not just the singing, although that could certainly play a part. And it’s not a failure on the part of my ears, per se, as there is a noticeable difference between the two. You can probably find audio files of both: compare the pronunciation of ich and mich in the two.
Ah, that’s Marius Mueller Westernhagen. He was born in Duesseldorf (which uses a softer “ch” in the word “ich”, similiar to the one in Koeln), but grew up in the “Ruhrpott” (the heavily industrialized area of the Ruhr valley) which uses a much harder and guttural “ch” in “ich”, and spent some of his formative years in Hamburg also (which uses “ik” in the local dialect). I think you can make a case for Westernhagen using a harder “ch” in normal speech than Till Lindemann would use. I have heard some interviews of Westernhagen, and he sounds like your typical “Ruhrpottler” (someone from Bochum, Dortmund, Essen, etc.) and they use a hard “ch” in their Westfalian dialect.
As already mentioned by others, the correct German pronounciation of the “ch” in “ich” is as an unvoiced open palatal fricative, which is different than the velar scrape of “ch” in “ach” or “noch”. However, there are some local dialects that use even this second pronounciation. A good example would be a Swiss German speaking “Hochdeutsch”. In “Schwyzerdtüsch” they use “i”, but when attempting to say “ich” you will hear the more guttural “ch”, since the softer “ch” is not a phoneme used in “Schwyzerdtüsch”.
I’m confused by some of the posts here that talk about certain German dialects using a “sh” or “sch” sound. Do you really mean the identical sound of English “sh” like in “champagne”? Or are you referring to the palatal fricative [ç] as in Hyundai? They’re not the same.
Yes, certain German dialects (Hessisch, Pfälzisch, Kölsch, Sächsisch) pronounce “ich” as “ish” (with the identical sound of English “sh” like in “champagne”). In fact in Hessisch (the dialect I grew up with) almost all palatal fricatives [ç], and also any soft "g"s are pronounced “sh”. This leads to wonderful words like:
Ish bin en langhaarishe Bombelesher (actually writtten “ich bin ein langhaariger Bombenleger”) 
in Pfälzisch, any s followed by a t is pronounced “sh” also. This leads to sentences like:
Hasht noch ee? (in correct German: “Hast du noch eine?”).
As you can see, the German dialects are very diverse. In fact I once spent some time near Garmisch-Partenkirchen and had to visit a doctor in a small village. The locals in the waiting room were all speaking “Oberbayrisch”, and it might as well have been Chinese to me.