At this time of year, the office always seems that bit quieter, half the group chat are unavailable for beer garden drinks and you’re spending the evenings looking for cheap flights.
It feels like everyone and anyone is going off on their travels at the moment, so maybe you’ve been brushing up on those GCSE language skills. Or, if you’re really hardcore, maybe you’ve been doing a mega streak on Duolingo in preparation.
But despite how confident you reckon you are, let’s be real, you’re probably not ready to sit and chat to the locals.
There’s always that cringe moment when you go away as you forget any foreign word you’ve ever learned and resort to chatting English instead - even if they can't understand it.
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And if you do still try and give it a go, you might be cringing out to hear how you sound.
That’s thanks to a bloke on TikTok who has shown what English holidaymakers actually sound like to locals.
User ‘languagesimp’ is a multilingual fella and wants you to know what the Anglo lingo sounds like to people who don't understand it.
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The effect is a little strange for those of us who do speak English, with one person commenting: “I felt like I should understand what he was saying.”
Another asked: “You are telling me people hear me talking like a Sim?”
While someone else wrote: “I feel like I understand what he's saying, but I also don't.”
A fourth person said: “This sounds right… but it’s not… ”
Yeah, pretty weird.
Basically, he makes it sound similar to Simlish, although the phrase ‘you’re literally dog water’ creeps in at one point.
He seems to have achieved this by using an accent and intonations which would be present in English but inserting nonsense words.
So, it'd sound like English sounds as a language except you wouldn't know the words and thus the meaning of what was being said would be robbed from you.
It's about as close as we're going to get to knowing it.
But aside from sounding like a Sim, what have people actually said English speakers sound like?
Voiceover website Voices put together a list of sound qualities foreigners have noted about English speakers, and let's just say it's not particularly complimentary.
They think English mainly involves:
- Slurred and garbled sounds
- Harsh 'r' sounds
- Overuse of 's', 'sh' and 'ch' sounds
- Interesting variations in rhythm and inflections
- Lots of 'ing' sounds at the end of words
- Dropping of consonants at the beginning and end of words
- Overemphasis on the beginning of words and underemphasis on the end
- Open and rolling vowel sounds
- Soft consonants
- Flat sounds
Ouch.
Topics: Travel, TikTok, Social Media, Viral
Jess Battison