Imitating English

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hello. My name is Richard Borowski.

I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin, and I do have a question.

What does English sound like to a non-English speaking person?

Now, I mean, how would a person who has heard English but doesn’t actually speak it imitate it?

Like, say, a child from Manchuria or someplace far away who’d heard the language a number of times but had no idea anything about it.

How would they imitate it the same way?

I remember when I was young imitating French or Chinese.

What makes this so difficult, I think, is it’s like asking a person to look at a face and see it as a collection of shapes and shadows on an oval rather than a face.

You sound like an artist.

Well, I’m a writer. I’m also an artist.

But here’s my question. Can you talk some fake English to me?

There’s so many different ways to take this.

Yeah, you said you had A Way with Words, Richard.

How about you?

Let’s hear it.

That’s exactly it.

I mean, I have no idea even what the most common sounds are.

Are they lots of THs and Ss?

All right.

We’ve got some answers here for you.

The first thing is you need to get on a computer and go to YouTube, and you need to Google or you need to search for fake English.

There are hundreds if not thousands of videos made by people who don’t speak English as a first language who are imitating English.

The sounds of English.

And some of them are hilarious.

And some of them are set to music.

People even sing songs like that.

The other thing is there’s a variety of a fake language in the game, The Sims, you know, these little fake digital people that you have a little eyes.

And there’s a language called Simlish, which sounds kind of like English but isn’t actually a language.

That, too, is kind of like that.

The other thing I’d say, when I lived in France, like more than 10 years ago, I used to do this thing for my French friends where I, as an English speaker, would imitate English speakers.

And that’s kind of what you’re talking about.

I would go, hi, I’m Grant. I’m very nice to meet you. It’s a pleasure to be here in Paris.

Because their impression is that we’re like horses chewing oats.

That we’re just like put our lips out in this huge way and our mouths move.

They’re gaping maws that are the sounds issuing from them.

And my Spanish-speaking friends think we sound like we’re snakes.

We have a lot of sibilant sounds.

And they’re sibilant to me.

Yeah, especially in Spain.

But you know what?

I have an Austrian friend who says that to Austrian’s ears we sound really nasal and that when she was studying English in middle school, she got the most compliments on her accent when she had a really bad head cold.

And she also says that they have a term for this.

They call it cowgum English, which means chewing gum English or bubble gum English, that we just sound kind of like, just more like how Grant was talking a minute ago.

Low lip scoring everyone.

But it would be interesting to hear people from other countries’ take on how we sound.

So we’d love for folks to call us and let us know.

Yeah, we have, we’re speaking directly to you, international listeners.

How do British speakers sound, American speakers?

Call us, leave it on the voicemail, 877-929-9673, and we’ll share these on a future show.

Well, that would be wonderful if I could hear it, but you say I should go to YouTube and I can hear some?

Yeah, yeah.

There’s tons of them.

Yeah, there’s very funny videos.

And it’s usually young folks kind of make it.

Because you have these young people meeting each other in these digital spaces online and kind of like reconciling their misunderstandings of each other.

And this is part of that.

It’s like, oh, I thought you guys all sounded like this.

And they’ll imitate it and it’s super funny.

Yeah, we’ll link to some of the best ones on our website too.

Thanks, Richard.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Great question.

Bye, Richard.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Nice meeting you.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.