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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.

This is fascinating *A*

I love when they mimic Americans speaking English in anime and it’s all “Shit!” and “OH MY GOD” and “pera pera pera” or something like that XD

I HAVE ALWAYS WONDERED

This is amazing.

It sounds like it should be American English but it’s just…not, and as somebody whose mother tongue is American English that’s really fascinating. And frustrating. It’s almost hard to listen to.

Is no one gonna mention how rad this song is tho?

This song is catchy as hell but listening to it is like someone flipped off the part of my brain that understands language. It sounds exactly like American English, but doesn’t make a syllable of sense. 

What does it sound like to British and Australian speakers?

As an Australian speaker, it definitely sounds American, but it’s a little too familiar to me (or maybe I’m hallucinating), so I think there’s an Australian accent thrown in there.

This is amazing! With English being my 2nd language, this represents all the views (listens?) I had of English as a child. My mother began to teach the language to me when I was around 5, but it wasn’t enough for me to understand anything substantial. It pretty much sounded exactly like this video: random accented gibberish here and there, with some words I recognized like “baby” and “alright”.
In fact, my older brother and I had characters who were “American” and whenever we had them speak “english”, they pretty much sounded exactly like this.
With all the immigrants found on the internet, or 2nd hand English speakers, I guess finding out how English sounds like to foreigners by just asking isn’t the same as actually receiving an example.  That’s why this video is so perfect.

I sound exactly like this when I can’t form words. I feel like I’m listening to my ‘native’ language, which is my own form of Gibberish. It’s great.

This song is incredibly groovy though.

:O  woooow this is cool.