Ve haff vays uff makingk you talk!

[muckefuck]

Bad German accents are getting depressingly common in ads these days. Volkswagen has been running a series of radio spots featuring a "German engineer" named "Wolfgang" who sounds about as German as Stimpson J. Cat. (Dude, it's all about the vowels.) Now Lexus is out there with a "chief engineer of a German car company" lamenting about how he'd be better off as a chef. Of course, he comes off sounding more like Basil Rathbone than Wolfgang Puck.

Advertisers, take note! This is what German-accented English really sounds like. I've been trying to nail down the most salient phonetic features and I'm afraid I haven't gotten very far. (Your career is safe from the likes of me, niemandsrose!) I was pleased as punch the other weekend when I finally identified one of the more pronounced features of my best German friend's accent: Short lax vowels.

In Standard German, vowel length is tied to vowel quality. Stressed tense vowels are long. Lax vowels are always short, whether the stressed or not, with one exception: ä. In German Bühnenaussprache, Ähre and Ehre contrast not in length but in quality. The first has [ɛ:], an open-mid lax vowel, the second [e:], which is higher and tense. (Of course, it's exactly these sorts of anomalies that tends to get leveled out in the process of language change and, for many German speakers, both words are homophones.)

This isn't the case in English. Forget what you learned about "long" and "short" vowels in grammar school; your teachers were describing vowel quality using terms that properly apply to quantity. "Long e" is generally somewhat longer than "short e", but only because it's a diphthong. In varieties where "short e" is diphthongised (like a broad Chicago accent), it's just as long.

How long stressed lax vowels are held in English depends on what follows. Before voiceless sounds (like /t/), they are shorter than before voiced sounds (like /d/). If you compare how you say "bit" to how you say "bid", you should find that the quality is the same in both (always "short i"), but that the vowel in "bid" lasts longer. My BGF doesn't have this distinction. He imports the rules of German allophony into English and makes the /ɪ/ in "bit" and that in "bid" almost exactly the same length. Why is this a problem? Because we often distinguish sounds as much by their effects on neighbouring sounds as anything else. Native speakers hearing his [bɪd] may easily mistake it for [bɪt].

Of course, on the downside, it made me ask myself, Damn, does that mean that all this time I've been making my lax vowels too long when I speak German? Ah, there's never any end to language learning!

Comments

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

But it's funny when VW hires a Swede to do the same bad German accent he did in The Big Lebowski!

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes it is.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Is this the Rappin' Ride-Pimper or someone else? (Yeah, I haven't seen Big Lebowski, so I suck, etc.; just answer the question.)

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

-> Peter Stormare, star of the Un-Pimp Your Auto TV ads. There's a scene in Lebowski in which he stars in a porno called Log Jammin' - it's unforgettable.

Meine dispatcher said there's something wrong with deine Kabel?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Holy crap! He was in Fargo! He looks a lot different clean-shaven and in a lab coat.

[grunter.livejournal.com]

He's a nihilist. He believes in nothing, Lebowski, NOTHING!

"And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your chonson."

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Oh, God, that's not really your experience of what German-accented English sounds like, is it?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

You've never heard anyone speak like that?

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Gah - not really! Of course, the commercial was probably exaggerating a bit.

(It was a _very_ funny commercial, though! :D)

[gopower.livejournal.com]

Sgt. Schultz will always remain the American archetype of a German accent.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Well, at least he was native German-speaker. The actor emigrated from Vienna at 28 and never lost his accent; he may have exaggerated it somewhat for the stage, but it's basically genuine. The man who played Col. Klink was a teenager when he came over, so it's possible that he was capable of speaking unaccented English. I don't know, since I never saw him in a role which demanded this.

Incidentally, the Brit and the Frenchy were also played by native-born actors, so Hogan's Heroes might actually have showcased some of the most authentic foreign accents of any television programme!

Vot are you sinking about?

[pne.livejournal.com]

Oh! Is that a commercial?

I had heard the scenario told as a joke, but didn't know that there was a commercial along those lines, too. (Presumable, the commercial came first and the joke is a re-telling of the commercial.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Could also be vice-versa. There have been adverts in the USA that cleverly played off of existing jokes, urban legends, truisms, etc.

[nashobabear.livejournal.com]

Wirrungen, Irrungen, ach du je!