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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 amazing…I’ve always wondered what English would sound like!

Very interesting.

song full of swagger

This is so fascinating!

This is fascinating. My brain keeps trying to make sense of it and it’s SO WEIRD.

I’ve always wondered what English sounds like, and I’m almost disappointed that it sounds…. exactly like English?

Because to me this sounds exactly like listening to a song in English where I keep missing what the lyrics are. My brain is convinced it’s words I’m just not making out. (Apart from the parts where my brain does make out words that are not actually there.)

So in other words, English sounds like Bob Dylan to the rest of the world???

(via liveindirt)