What does English sound like to non-speakers?

If you do not know a language, although the words may not mean anything, it is possible to pick up ‘sounds’ or ‘accents’.

Catherine Tate picked up on this when she used an exaggerated form in her ‘interpreter scene’ where she imitated 7 languages by picking up on few words/ sounds that she remembered are stereotypically similar to that language. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNKn5ykP9PU. Although the words do not mean anything, it is funny because the viewers have these same generalisations about the languages.

A similar video was released a few days ago but it has already had almost 3 million views. It is clever because ‘smoukahontas’ (her myspace name) says a few sentences in gobbledygook, but it sounds similar to what foreigners would hear. If I heard some people talking in one of these languages (apart from English/ Spanish) I would think that they were the genuine language, so I think she achieved her goal – it is even possible to know the language she is imitating from the sounds. I noticed in the comments most people say that their languages are wrong but the others sound pretty much like they hear, which is the point. Someone who is proficient in the language is able to pick out subtleties in accent and pronunciation that non-speakers could not detect. This comment caught my eye: ‘WOW, portuguese sounds strange like that? It's so bizarre!’. This comment shows that it can be weird to hear your own language with nonsensical words because instead of thinking about meaning, you only think about the sounds, which is fascinating.

This same idea can be used in songs. The following song is nonsense, but it uses English words so it sounds English (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz04IBZqfFE). This is similar to a linguistic article written by Mark Liberman, entitled ‘yaourter’ (‘chanter en yaourt’). This is a french word which is when someone sings in a language their unfamiliar with, they tend to use nonsense words that sound like the target language. It is apparently quite common for the French to sing in ‘anglais yaurt’. For example, ‘"Like a candle in the wind" becomes something like "Lagaakadeuh izeu wiiii" – 'eu' being the French sound, similar to the 'i' in "bird".)’ This is fascinating because the singer joins 3 words together as they are unfamiliar with the language they cannot hear the ‘gaps’ between words like native speakers can.

The whole article can be found here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1593 

Another way to identify the sounds in languages is by looking at onomatopoeias because although they aim to imitate the noise of an object, they do reflect the language spoken and they are different in each language. There was an interesting interview with Derek Abbott on radio four about the different ways of representing animal noises. For example, they used the example of duck noises. Below is a table of some of the representations for duck noises.

Language	Representation of duck noise
English	Quack, quack
French	Coin, coin
Italian	Qua, qua
Japanese	Ga, ga
Danish	Rap, rap

As you can see from the table, most of the words contain the ‘qua’ sound apart from the Japanese and the Danish.

Looking at other noises is also very interesting. For example, in English we have four different words to represent bird noises and the word we use depends on the size of the bird. For example, a big bird would ‘squark’ where as a smaller one would ‘chirp’. Most languages had two or three equivalents to these but interestingly, very few had a word for ‘squark’. This may be due to having fewer large birds in the country, but I think this is unlikely. 

 Abbott found that the largest variation of names was of sheep. Around 50% began with ‘b’ (i.e baa) but many also began with ‘m’.

We can conclude from the animal noises that although people hear the same noise, they think about it differently depending on the sounds in their own language, so it is really useful to compare. 

Although we will never know what it is like as a non-English speaker to listen to the English language, we can assume that they would hear a string of syllables where the words are not separated correctly and that the sounds would be very similar to those in the videos that we have discussed.