They sound… Germanic to me, including English.
That comes from certain phonological commonalities among this language family that makes for a certain kinship. Unlike most other respondents I’ll focus on how other Germanic languages as a whole contrast with other language families. For context I speak German natively, English native-like, then several Romance languages, a bit of Dutch and Danish and a smattering of Hungarian.
Here’s what the phonologies of the Germanic languages have in common:
- An audibly large, differentiated vowel phoneme repertoire (1) that native speakers of non-Germanic languages usually struggle with.
- Distinct vowel length contrast that usually (but not always) mates open articulation to short vowels and closed articulation to long ones.
- A stressed-timed prosody (speech rhythm) with stressed syllables receiving noticeably more articulatory weight than unstressed ones (2).
- Except for Dutch, Afrikaans, and certain German dialects, there are usually aspirated plosives (stops) like /pʰ/, /kʰ/, /tʰ/.
- There’s often some nucleus you can understand or guess at without much foreknowledge as a speaker of one Germanic language when overhearing a conversation in another, though I have some reservations about most English speakers in that regard.
French has a noticeably Germanic (Frankish) influenced vowel system. While clearly not a Germanic language, that gives it an overall sound quality quite unlike that of other Romance languages. Most Romance and many Slavic languages, and also Modern Greek, give roughly equal weight to the articulation of each syllable, so word stress does not have quite the same effect (with a few exceptions, see #2 below). In Slavic languages the phonetic effect of palatalisation is a strong component of their overall sound impression, and in Hungarian a consistent if weak first-syllable stress is completely independent from the distribution of vowel length—just to illustrate how certain languages or language families contrast with the bullet points above.
(1) A similarly extensive vowel system exists in Turkish, too, as far as I know.
(2) Portuguese (Romance) and Russian (Slavic) have quite pronounced effects of stress on vowel quality, too, however without distinguishing vowel quantity, i.e. length.
To touch on the specific sound impressions of other Germanic languages, as that was obviously part of the question, too:
Dutch is phonetically close to some of the Ripuarian (Rhineland) dialects I’ve been familiar with since childhood. It has a certain iambic, ta-daah, ta-daah speech rhythm (in some speakers) and an overall laidback feel, with less tense articulation than German. Same goes for offspring Afrikaans.
Yiddish is German that’s hard to understand at first. After a while it begins to sound like certain upper German dialects (Palatinate, Franconian maybe…) pristinely preserved, and that is exactly where some of its roots were. It has audible Slavic adstrats and some Slavic derived idiomatic calques like the concept of verb aspect.
Swedish and Norwegian have a famous tone accent that produces a characteristic melody. Danish has a secondary-articulation glottal stop (stød) in lieu of that tone accent that produces an unusual micro-hiatus in otherwise smooth speech. The occurrence of <d> and sometimes <t> articulated as a dental approximant (softened /ð/) causes an effect often described as garbled.
Icelandic has a wonderfully archaic sound, as if our fore-bearers are speaking to us in hipster disguise. This is as close to Old Norse as you get, and it’s as if you hear the blustery, thundering North Atlantic in the background. Trite clichés aside, it produces a really intriguing accent when Icelanders speak other Germanic languages.
English has a distinct sound impression from the retroflex /ɹ/, particularly in its rhotic varieties where vowels become r-coloured. Together with the approximant /w/ and the preserved dentals /ð/ and /θ/ which many other Germanic languages have lost, it has a more liquid quality. The proliferation of diphthongs give certain variants of English a twangy sound.
German has quite dry and brittle phonetics and slightly tense sounding vowels. In my humble opinion, and speaking of clichés, that is why it can easily produce an impression of harshness when articulated with a stabby, sharp or pedantic attitude. Speakers of German, Swiss, and Austrian dialects may dismiss this as just a feature of Standardhochdeutsch. It’s not, just chill when speaking.
No comments:
Post a Comment