And how can I find out?
You know what I mean… we can do “impressions” of German or Chinese or French that are fake and others can recognize what language we’re pretending to speak, there are patterns of sounds in each language that identify it.
But as a native English speaker, I really don’t know what English “sounds” like to non-native English speakers.
So…any non-native English speakers wanna gimme a call and do an impression of English for me?
I’m a native English speaker, but I think it would depend on what type of English speaker they were trying to do an impression of. An example of this is where some Black comedians do a so-called impression of a White person’s speech pattern or “accent”.
Well, that doesn’t really cover it. I can do at least a dozen different accents of English (several East Coast, Australian, Irish, several British, a couple Southern, etc.) myself, but I’m sure the distinctions between these are not really that apparent to someone who doesn’t speak any English at all. After all, can you, if you do not speak Spanish, tell the difference between the speech of a Mexican, a Spaniard, and a Cuban? I sure can’t. It all sounds like Spanish to me.
Easy. Listen to a very technical discussion you don’t understand, maybe an advanced Physics lecture or a continuing ed lecture on tape for pediatric neurosurgeons, or (in my case) sportscasting for a detailed sport you know nothing about. That will give you the sound and lilt of English without all of that annoying and distracting meaning.
Have fun!!
Note: be sure to choose regional accent of choice!
Actually, my hearing is getting so crappy that pretty soon I’ll be able to answer my own inquiry. As it is I have to use the captions on most of my DVDs.
I’d assume it sounds like:
aghl ghlaughlugh aghlaug aghlaughg brblurbrubb rhlru hluhalug
Of course I only speak English so I’m guessing here.
Well, English is a Germanic language. So your first clue would be German or other Germanic languages. But English is also influenced slightly by the Celts (being England, an all). And because of the Normans, much French found its way into English. French is not like German at all. French and Spanish are Romansh languages descended from Latin. So listen to some Latin for the feel of that for a clue. But the biggest clue is your Germanic language, because (as I stated earlier and I’ve a horrible habit of being redundant) English is a Germanic language.
I told a Dane once that his language sounded very musical. He said English sounded very snobbish. So I snubbed him after that.
Slow? Seriously, most languages I don’t understand sound like they’re being spoken at a million miles an hour.
Still, if Billy Connoly is actually speaking English in his stand up routines then I guess that’s what English sounds like to someone that can’t understand it; sort of like the Swedish Chef :).
Heh, that’s quite funny. My ex-wife (native of England, fluent in French, Norwegian, modern Icelandic, a few other languages to boot) used to say that Danish sounded like “Norwegian with a bad accent.” I guess the same could go for Swedish.
I would have a feeling that the answer to what English sounded like to a non-speaker would be different depending on the language abilities of the listener. To me, just about every language I don’t understand sounds like jibberish. Even languages I understood in reading comprehension sailed over my head. To my ex-wife, on the other hand, most languages sounded a little comprehensible, even if she didn’t know what the words meant.
My last two cents…I suspect most foreigners think English sounds reallly slooooow.
…You know, I don’t think we’re going to be able to get a firsthand answer here, seeing as, in order to read and respond to the OP, one would have to understand English ;).
…I don’t think that English would sound slow to foreigners, though. I’m pretty sure the only reason that we percieve other languages to be fast is because we don’t fully understand them. I could be wrong though, almost-exclusive English speaker that I am.
A Mexican friend of mine says that, to a Spanish speaker, English sounds like dogs barking. Compared to the staccato delivery of Spanish, I can see how the cadence of English would more closely resemble Fido.
There were a couple of other threads on this a while ago, and what I remember most of all from those discussions was that the word “Sierra” would be pretty typical of sounds common in English that aren’t as common in other languages. The hissing “s,” the “ee.” Maybe the “r,” as well, I’m not sure.
2cents.
Well, the unrolled ‘R’ in American English is very rare; most languages that have R’s roll them. That’d stick out like Satan in a church. And few languages I’m aware of have such a love of the schwa–I read somewhere that it makes up to twenty percent of our vowel sounds. I suspect we’d sound like ‘uhhhh uuhhh uh uhhhuhh’ to a foreigner.
English does seem a touch slower to me, at least my dialect of English–and I’m said to talk pretty fast. But do remember that English is a very compressed language, with oodles of contractions and monosyllables–the sentence ‘I haven’t gone home yet’ has six syllables in English. It’s German equivalent, ich bin noch nicht nach Hause gegangen, has ten (well, I tend to smoosh ich and bin into a monosyllable, making that phrase a nonosyllabic one, but I think that’s just me). French, je suis pas allé à la maison; nine syllables.
In both cases, there’s a lot more to get done saying. That, I suspect, is why most foreign languages sound faster to us. And there’s that whole not-understanding bit. I get this a lot in German, in that the parts I understand sound at a fairly normal pace, but the parts that whoosh over my head, well, whoosh. I watched The Mummy dubbed in French today, and that very same thing happened.
I could go a lot deeper than this whole thing, but I have to use big technical words and I run the risk of being proven wrong by someone who knows better (oh, Jomo Mojooooo…).
I had a friend who spoke Spanish as his first language, and asked him this, he made some sounds heavy on the Ws, Bs, and alliterative two syllable words.
I lived in Denmark for a year, to me Danish sounded like the word “blur” being lengthened and pronounced gutturally. Then I learned how to speak the language…
Being “new” to English (I started when I was four… I’m 14 now) I have vague memories of how English sounded when I didn’t speak it. My first language (Farsi) was more monophomenous (is that a word?), with alot of the consonant sounds being similar. English is not. The vowels, however, were all similar. Some something like “Tuhkuh luhsuh muhvuh huh”. More chattering than speech…
My cousins wife is Brazilian and apparently can only understand UK English. So when I was speaking to her she had a blank look and basically mimicked the sounds of what she heard. She said all these weird sounding words that didn’t make sense and felt that was what I was saying in English. She finally told us that she didn’t understand my version of English. And I wasn’t even speaking cockney.
I lived in Denmark for a year, to me Danish sounded like the word “blur” being lengthened and pronounced gutturally. Then I learned how to speak the language…
Being “new” to English (I started when I was four… I’m 14 now) I have vague memories of how English sounded when I didn’t speak it. My first language (Farsi) was more monophomenous (is that a word?), with alot of the consonant sounds being similar. English is not. The vowels, however, were all similar. Some something like “Tuhkuh luhsuh muhvuh huh”. More chattering than speech…
Actually, being that most poeple around the globe understand at least some English, most people impersonating Americans tend to say along the lines iof “What what hi hi me you what”
I posted that twice? God I’m dumb…
Even as a native speaker, I’ve noticed the proliferation of the “uh” sound in the English language, Punkkid.
Good point.