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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.

Interesting and entertaining

I love this video. (If this pops up on my dash again, it will get reblogged again. And again. And again. Idk why this entertains me so much; it just does.)

Reblogging to watch later.

Yes! I love this forever too. The dancing!

This is awesome.

Will always reblog. My sister & I jam out to this song.

One, this is catchy. Two, … this is exactly how basically all songs I ever listen to sound like. I almost never listen to lyrics. Ever. It’s incredibly rare if I actually know all the words to something.

This is one of my favorite songs.

This is really neat.