What does English sound like to foreign ears?
We’ve all heard examples of fake Chinese or German from speakers who lack familiarity with either language. While typically cringe-worthy, these examples do raise interesting questions regarding our own language. What does English sound like to non-English speakers? After more than 40 years, Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” remains one of the most illuminating examples.
The entire song is nonsense verse, neither English nor Italian, but the sounds are meant to resemble English. Linguist Mark Liberman wrote an interesting post about this sort of thing over at Language Log discussing yaourter, the French word for an attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that one doesn’t know all that well. This often involves trying to sing a foreign song with nonsense or random words filling in the blanks. Liberman shares this wonderful quote from a random Internet user:
Just for the story, in France, when we don’t speak English and we want to imitate the sound, we call it “yaourter”(to yoghourt), the imitation sounds like a very nasal language, kind of like a baby crying. It mostly imitates the “cowboy” accent.
I love this, I didn’t realize it until I saw the video that we sounded so awesome
also be aware that this is also an american sounding accent and british english would sound as different as it does to them as it does to us
this is cool as fuck
also be aware that this is also an american sounding accent and british english would sound as different as it does to them as it does to us
No, it doesn’t, ESPECIALLY in music. It was hard for me to tell that Spice Girls were British when I first started listening to them as an ESL student, until way after I could actually speak English. Before I learnt to speak English I didn’t even know there were different English accents and I couldn’t tell the difference between badly accented CHINESE english, French accented Englihs, Jamaican, and american, british, australian etc. accents. It all just sounded “English” to me, and I was pretty old when I had to start learning English starting from the ABCs, around 9 years old.
omg this is so cool! now i want to know what people think about spanish sounds
but the song is so damn catchy ; A ;
(Source: blogs.howstuffworks.com, via kurookami)
