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.

Scottish Independence

Continuing this theme of international relations, let us explore the effects of Scottish independence on language. Although we are still unsure on whether Scotland will gain independence, we can begin to predict the changes that it may bring with it.

According to the 2011 Census, the population was 5,296,400 which is only 8.4% of the population in the United Kingdom. This would make Scotland the 113^th most populated country if it were a sovereign state.

English is the official language of Scotland, however, Scots and Scottish Gaelic are officially recognised languages. In fact, according to the Gaelic Language Act (2005), Gaelic was given ‘equal respect’ to English. Although in 1996, 30% of Scottish inhabitants were fluent in Scots, this number has declined considerably and it has also been found that less than 1% of people speak Scottish Gaelic, so these are both minority languages

Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language that is used in the Scottish highlands and according to historical texts, was brought over from Ireland in the 1300s. However, this view has recently been opposed by archaeologists who have not found any evidence of the Irish settlers. The language itself is made up out of 18 letters, not including vowels with accents. Gaelic nouns have gender and they also have cases and the word order is verb-subject-object (unlike subject-verb-object in English). The BBC broadcasts a radio station in Gaelic called ‘Radio nan Gàidheal’ and also the television channel ‘BBC Alba’, which are available across the UK.

Scots is a Germanic language which is spoken in Scottish lowlands. It is disputed whether Scots is in fact a language or a dialect and 64% of the population "don't really think of Scots as a language". Scots is much more similar to English than Gaelic as it follows the subject-verb-object word order and many words are recognisable.

This is a small section of text in Scots:

Thar are mony folk, wha hae spoken English a' their grown-up days wha like to gang back to the tongue o' their bairnhood, i' the mirk and shadows o' auld age. Thar are ithers wha seem tae tak better to the Word whan it comes to them wi' a wee o' the Scottish birr. And thar are a hantle o' folk - and I meet them a'gate - wha dinna speak Scots theirsels, but are keen to hear it, and like to read it.

On the 18^th of September 2014, there will be a referendum for Scottish nationals to vote whether they would like to be independent from the UK. Although politicians have been reassuring people that independence will not make a big difference as Scotland will remain in the EU and will keep pound sterling as its currency, references to language has been very infrequent.

I think that if Scotland becomes independent, due to border controls and since fewer people will cross the border, the language is Scotland may change further away from British English. This may lead to the Scottish dialect may become a different language. However, I doubt this because of the influences of the media and internet, the Scots will still be exposed to English.

However, Scotland is not the only sovereign state considering independence. Catalonia also wants to become independent from Spain, which may have a larger impact on their language. Catalan has been oppressed since Franco’s rein but if Catalonia was granted independence, it may give inhabitants a push to revitalise the language.

St Andrew's Cross (Flag of Scotland)