Vhy zee Germans speak like zis

 

Impersonations of foreign speakers of English are often used to create humorous effect in television. Sitcoms such as 'Allo Allo' use exaggerated accents in a theatrical manner in order to highlight the funny, quirky mistakes learners make and stir up laughter within the audience. The unusual way in which learners order their utterances and pronounce certain sounds can sometimes leave us baffled. But I'm here to study why they make the mistakes they do, and how they cope with learning the English language. I'm focusing on Germans in particular, and the difference it makes, if any, in how old you are when you begin learning the English language. Fortunately, I have four young bilingual cousins, a German grandmother and two half-German uncles to use as my guinea pigs!

 

Although both English and German belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, there are several common errors that crop up incessantly. These all sprout from the differences in phonological features, grammar, the alphabet, use of vocabulary and tense (put forward by Frankfurt International School).

 

Firstly, there are a few mispronunciations that can be heard during speech. Although the German alphabet contains the same twenty six letters as ours (plus an added four 'umlauted' letters) and the majority of our letters look the same, they are pronounced differently. Sometimes German speakers have trouble producing some of our sounds simply because of the fact that these sounds do not exist in their language. An example of this is the 'th' sound in words such as 'this' and 'that'. Germans often make the error of pronouncing 'the' as /və/ or /zə/ and 'that' as /væt/ or /zæt/, replacing the /θ/ sound with /v/ sound, (or in some cases /vet/ or /zet/ due to the muddling of the /e/ and /æ/ sound).

 

Another mispronunciation of sounds occurs when reciting the alphabet. In Germany, the letter 'I' is pronounced similar to /i:/ and the letter 'e' is pronounced similar to /I/. Errors also occur in written work as 'a' is commonly replaced with 'r' due to 'a' being pronounced similarly to our 'r' and 'e' being replaced with 'I' due to the same reason.

 

Tense also becomes regularly muddled attributable to the fact that the German language does not have a progressive form. Germans may say 'I can come now, I see you there' when they are missing out the all important 'will' to create a continuous tense. Mishaps are also spotted when Germans use the present perfect tense in the wrong way, as they often use it to function as a conversational past tense phrase such as 'Yesterday I have been swimming' as opposed to our 'I went swimming yesterday.'

Through studying my relatives and looking for differences between them, I realised that even though both sets of my cousins were brought up in the same conditions, one set held stronger accents than the other. All of my cousins have been brought up into families where they have only been permitted to converse with their parents in English; however, one set shares a German parent and the other shares two English parents. This shows that even if children are conditioned in the same way, the accent of one parent deeply affects them (especially the German parent being the mother). The mother figure often holds strong bonds between her and her children and I have yet to find research and theories that reflect and support my findings. I eagerly await to complete my investigation and broaden my knowledge of Germans learning English.

By Charley Vincent