I’ve always wondered this, but the answers one finds by Googling the question are woefully uninformative. (“Bien” [“good”] is the pathetically vacuous answer that a lot of Spanish-speakers tend to give.)
I’m looking for actual descriptions of how English sounds…you know, with like, adjectives?
For example, to me, Russian sounds dark and harsh, yet at the same time, velvety and melodious. German to me sounds terse, brusque, and biting, but also rather sing-songy.
So how does English–either British, Australian, or most especially, American–sound to non-English speakers?
I have been told by more than a few Romance-language speakers (French, Catalan, Spanish) that English sounds like a “hissing” language because of the relative frequency of sibilants (sounds such as /s/, /z/, /sh/) and affricates (e.g. /ch/, /j/). Speakers of other Germanic languages and of Slavic languages may not share this impression.
This kind of thing will vary a lot depending on the language of the non-English speaking listener.
EDIT: for those who know the IPA, please forgive the way the examples given in the first paragraph
There was a thread not too long ago on how different languages sound to speakers of various other languages, but my searches have failed to turn it up. Perhaps someone else will recall it better.
According to my five year old son, English sounds something like “warsch farscjh sarsshjf”, I interpret that to mean that English sounds to Spanish-speaking people almost like German sounds to English-Speaking people, something that checks with what I remember from the times before I learned English.
That’s not true – there ARE distinct things that can stand out. There’s a lot of subjectivity to picking out what stands out, yes … but there are actual, definable aspects of individual languages that leave impressions on non-speakers.
An example would be the aspects of spoken French that speakers of English commonly latch on to: the relative prevalance of nasal vowels (words like Jean, inviter, couchon) and of front rounded vowels (e.g. lune, jeune), for instance.
Another thing about spoken English (doesn’t matter what dialect) that can come off as … well, “odd”, I guess … is listening to the cadence of the words. Per the first wiki link below: “English is a stress-timed language … stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate, and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this.” This will sound unusual to speakers of languages such as Spanish and Japanese which “… have syllable timing (e.g. Spanish) or mora timing (e.g. Japanese), where syllables or morae are spoken at a roughly constant rate regardless of stress.”
These differences in stress/timing are a major reason why some languages sound so quickly spoken – it’s not just because you don’t know the words Listeners of a stress-timed language may interepret a stream of syllable-timed speech as something of a rapid-fire “breathless” delivery. Thinking of it like this: as English speakers, we’re used to a stressed syllable, then a “downbeat” made up of a few consecutive unstressed syllables. The stressed syllables come at somewhat relative intervals, and there’s an up-&-down to the delivery. To an English-speaking listener, a Spanish speaker is uttering an unusually long and unbroken stream of consecutive “stressed” syllables.
Good articles related to this topic:
Thanks, bordelond, I actually remember that from my grad classes in linguistics, but didn’t recall it 'til you brought it up. (My Master’s is in Spanish language.) You articulated it very well, as it can be something of a dense, academic point.
I’m a person who has always found it very difficult to discern words in most songs, especially pop and rock songs with a lot instrumentals in them (drum beats, guitar, etc.). If I’m lucky, I can usually pick out the chorus with enough repetition.
(If you think this is odd, then think about how many people liked the song “Louie Louie” in which most of the song is unintelligible. That’s how all songs sound like to me.)
The upshot is that this song sounded exactly like most songs sound like to me. It didn’t sound like gibberish any more than any other song I hear. I even picked up actual words in the chorus (e.g. the repeated “All right!”).
And I love listening to music. The lyrics just don’t do much for me, because I rarely understand them. If I really like a song, I’ll download the lyrics so I can find out what’s being sung.
Listeners of a stress-timed language may interepret a stream of syllable-timed speech as something of a rapid-fire “breathless” delivery. Thinking of it like this: as English speakers, we’re used to a stressed syllable, then a “downbeat” made up of a few consecutive unstressed syllables. The stressed syllables come at somewhat relative intervals, and there’s an up-&-down to the delivery. To an English-speaking listener, a Spanish speaker is uttering an unusually long and unbroken stream of consecutive “stressed” syllables.