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Accent Videos and Phonology

Ever since I started learning Japanese in early university, I’ve been super interested in accents. Not just my own; I mean, even after years and years, my Japanese still has too much stress in it, making my Japanese speech rise and fall too much. And it probably always will. But as I got into linguistics, the interest grew stronger: foreign accents make for a really interesting and rich topic for second language acquisition and phonology. Transfer from one language to another is perhaps clearest in accents; that’s pretty much what accents are.

So last week, Dana from Wanted Adventure, a cool channel about learning German and living as an American immigrant in Germany - perhaps you remember her from last year’s VidCon video? - sent over a couple of interesting videos from Don’t Trust the Rabbit, looking at the host Trixi’s analysis of the American accent in German, and the German accent in English. And I figured those’d be fun to look at. So check it below here:

Let’s start with the American accent in German one:

Trixi does a good job here of highlighting some particular points about the accent, and I just wanted to address a couple of them a bit more linguistically, like for grouping things! Like, okay: Trixi talks separately about how English speakers will keep [d] and [g] at the end of words, where in German, they’d get pronounced as [t] and [k], respectively. That’s a product of final devoicing - in German, stops and fricatives at the end of syllables all show up as voiceless, like [t] and [k], even if underlyingly, they’re voiced, like [d] or [g]. It’s a phonological process that exists in German, but not in English. And so we treat the German words as if they’re English-y, and keep those sounds around. We’d also expect to find it for English speakers not changing [b] to [p] or [z] to [s] at the end of syllables.

Another thing is about the treatment of vowels like [e] or [o]. Trixi notes that Americans learning German produce sounds like [ej] or [ow], instead, which is pretty noticeable in German, where those sounds just stay pure, longer vowels, like [e:] or [o:]. And it’s true - most American English dialects don’t really have pure [e] or [o] at all; it always takes on this changing quality over the course of the sound, the tongue rising up. It’s just what we do. But we don’t even notice we’re doing it, generally, so it’s pretty easy to swap over. And Trixi does note in the other video, German speakers don’t treat the vowels as combinations in English.

Speaking of which: how about for the German accent in English video?

Okay, so as you’d expect, we get the opposite of the trends we talked about above: English lacking devoicing, like [d] staying as [t] at the end of syllables in German speakers’ use of English is transferring over their German phonological rule into English, and the vowels not changing. And there’s a lot that’s given from the overlapping writing systems of German and English, like the differences in pronouncing the letters f/v/w between the two languages.

But there's at least one other thing we can describe here, too: how about the matter --> madder thing? Well, in American English, a [t] (or [d]) sound in between two vowels like that will get turned into a quick flap [ɾ]. Not in British English, but in American English, yes. I’m super familiar with that one, being named Moti - I get a lot more [mowɾi], generally, particularly from non-linguists.

Finally, in both videos, there’s a discussion of the word boundaries being sharper in German than English, of the speech being more staccato. And... I’m not 100% sure why that is? I’ve done some digging, and there’s not really differences in what the intonation boundaries look like in German vs. English at the word level. So it’s not like German actually has more prosodic breaks, as far as I can tell.

After discussing it with a couple of linguist friends and poking around more through some German phonology papers and pages, I’m wondering if it’s just that German in most dialects aspirates word-final stops. So there’d be a pause and some breath, which would definitely break up the word flow more, and make the words sound sharper. But if anyone knows a different explanation for this, I’d like to hear it!

So yeah - really interesting videos, and a good taste of what goes into accents. There’s obviously nothing wrong with speaking with an accent! But just how one manifests can tell you a bunch about what languages you’re looking at actually do. ^_^

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