How English sounds to non-English speakers

[nancylebov]

Well, sometimes. I have trouble making out song lyrics anyway, so I couldn't tell it was gibberish. There's a shoe in there somewhere.

This is an Italian parody in gibberish of a pop song I'd never heard. It's good quality silliness and charming dancing.

I suspect it's a parody of American body language as well as spoken language.

If I want to hear what an American accent sounds like, it helps to listen to the BBC. After a few years, the American accents started jumping out at me instead of just sounding normal.

The other educational accent experience was reading Sean Stewart's Mockingbird-- it's set in Texas. It isn't written in dialect, but when a Canadian character shows up (someone with an accent more like my Delaware accent than a Texan accent would be), the Canadian "sounds" very clipped and emotionally flat.

The book's about a woman who inherits a bunch of small annoying gods from her mother and has to figure out how to deal with them. It's pretty good.

Video link thanks to tamnonlinear.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I have a German translation of Harry Potter 4 on CDs, in which Rita Skeeter speaks German with a clear American accent, not British or anything else. It's wildly exaggerated, the equivalent of a German saying "zis und zat" in an American movie.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

WOW! Fantastic! Thanks for posting this link.

A few things: no, it's not a parody, it's a genuine honest-to-God song written (he may well be improvising the "words") by the strange guy, Adriano Celentano, an absolute pop icon in Italy, as is the blond woman dancing with him, Raffaella Carra'.

This is a typical example of what pre-Berlusconi Italian tv used to be like, and at the time I despised it. Now I feel incredibly nostalgic. I don't know what particular program this was, but the Saturday Night show was of course an institution, and Raffaella Carra' hosted a long string of them (as indeed did Celentano).

Celentano himself is a strange fish, either an absolute genuis or an idiot or both. He is very weird in a not completely good way, but he is very gifted as singer, composer, and dancer. I suspect he doesn't actually know English very well, but he can copy the sound of it perfectly.

So yes - absolutely, this is exactly what American sounds like when you don't speak the language. That's what I heard whenever I heard English spoken for the first forty years of my life or so, even if I knew the language. I only started to be able to understanding it without having to pay attention about a year after I moved to London.

And yes about American accents sticking out - and whenever I am in the US for a bit and I come back the recorded voice on the Tube sounds like they are taking the mickey out of us all.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Thank you for some greater context. This video made rounds in other bits of my friends page some months back, but no context at all but for Celentano.

[henrytroup.livejournal.com]

The syllables are all English; it's like a very-low-order Markov chain run on English pop songs. There are very few actual words of more than one syllable in there to my ear. Lots of "we" and "I" and "eyes" and "you" maybe a "door".

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

There's a more available example. Just listen to Yellow Ledbetter by Pearl Jam. It's entirely in English but 90% of the lyrics are incomprehensible. DJ's often joked about it.