Are these two speaking English ? Check out the video below. Image Credit: YouTube / Brian and Karl
Ever wondered how someone who doesn't speak English might perceive a conversation in English ?
For those of us who speak English but don't speak any other languages, the confusing experience of listening to someone talking in French, Spanish or German is likely all too familiar.
But how can someone who does speak English experience what their own language might sound like to someone who doesn't understand it at all ?
It turns out that there is a way to find out - as demonstrated in a video from 2021 in which TikTok user @languagesimp demonstrates a very strange form of English that seems familiar in one respect, but is complete nonsense in another.
For those who cannot access TikTok or who would like to see another example, below is a YouTube video entitled "Skwerl" that essentially demonstrates the same thing.
In it, a couple can be heard conversing over dinner, but despite sounding as though they are speaking English, their sentences are in fact total gibberish.
The effect is quite strange - you can understand the individual words but not the context.
Some have likened it to the fictional language spoken in The Sims video game franchise.
We had a man from Newcastle in custody once, we had to get another Northerner to translate for us. I could not understand anything he said, but some people said they could get some meaning. It was worse than this:
I remember the times when I didn't understand any English. It sounded like a torrent of weird noises, with almost no separate words discernible, like birds chirping, which amazingly had some meaning for those initiated who could understand it, because they listened to that chirping very carefully and expressed different emotions from time to time. I envied them very much. Incredibly I began to understand native English speakers only when began watching (the now-blocked in my country) YouTube: at the moment I studied English for almost 20 years but all these years were almost useless for unders... [More]
Yeah, the burr's a bit thick! I was watching a show called Connections, narrated by a chap named James Burke. I understood him perfectly, but my sister's husband from California couldn't.
If your read classical English literature (Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle) you find lower-class characters' lines like this quite often, spelled literally as "vot 'us 'ut all a'boot" ?
Yes, Rudyard Kipling wrote poetry in the vernacular, like that. Danny Deever By Rudyard Kipling ‘What are the bugles blowin’ for?' said Files-on-Parade. ‘To turn you out, to turn you out,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘What makes you look so white, so white?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play, The Regiment’s in ’ollow square—they’re hangin’ him to-day; They’ve taken of his buttons off an’ cut h... [More]
I had to teach ESL to angels that spoke in tongues and that was like listening to English with marbles you would think such glorious creatures would speak loud enough to be heard clearly
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