schwül or schwul? There is a difference...

I think a really good party trick would be to be able to do accents. Have you ever told a story to someone and there came a moment where you could have used a particular accent to give the anecdote a little more authenticity, but you didn’t really know which sounds to use or at least if you did you didn’t land them correctly and then at the end of your attempt you say something to the extent of “Yeah, well I’m not that good at doing accents, but you get the idea.”  That’s kind of how I am.

For a long time I didn’t really notice my accent. It wasn’t until I studied in Ireland, where Irish English was the standard that I noticed I am an American and you can hear it in my accent. For example, I was in a phonetics class [linguistic sidebar: phonetics is the study of sounds in language and how they are perceived and articulated using the different parts of the mouth and throat] and the professor was lecturing on the use of the intervocalic (that means between two vowels) /t/ and /d/ sounds, which in American English is realized as an alveolar tap before unstressed vowels. I know, that probably didn’t make sense. Let me explain, an Irish (or British, Australian or South African for that matter) person would pronounce the words butter or party with a hard /t/ sound, but an American would pronounce the same words with this tap sound (which sounds almost like a /d/, however there is a difference in how the two sounds are articulated). Thus, for speakers of American English, pairs such as ladder/latter, metal/medal, and coating/coding are pronounced the same. The professor asked the class, “Where is my American?” as he knew that I was an exchange student in his class, and asked me to read aloud a list of words which demonstrate this pronunciation (butter, party, bottle…among others) to show the difference. That was the first realization I had about my American accent in an English-speaking context.

Indeed each variety of English has its own features to get used to. The International Dialects of English Archive is a really interesting website. It has catalogued audio clips of both native and non-native speakers of English from virtually all over the world. The speakers first read a story and then tell a personal story so as to show the differences between the varieties of English when someone reads something that is written and speaks naturally. As an English teacher I mostly hear accents of non-native speakers, and have gotten used to the different aspects of them. For instance, once during a speaking exercise in one of my classes a while ago (while I was still teaching in the states) there was a French woman talking to a Korean woman. In the activity students had to talk about what they did over the weekend. The French woman was telling the Korean woman “I ate Italian food.” It is worth noting that some French speakers can have difficulty with the “h” sound in English and sometimes pronounce words that start with “h” without an “h” sound (for example, “is,” instead of “his,” or  “and” instead of “hand.” Likewise they sometimes insert an “h” sound between a word ending with a vowel and another word beginning with a vowel to act as a kind of bridge between the vowel sounds, as is the case in this story.) So when the French woman said, “I ate Italian food,” she was actually saying “I hate Italian food,” and seemed confused when the Korean girl asked with a puzzled expression, “Oh really, why?”

Like most native speakers of English I am able to estimate roughly where another native speaker is from based on their accent (at this point even non-native speakers). For example, I am from California (specifically southern California) and tend to use words such as: dude, totally, like or chill not so much as an affectation, but rather as an unfortunate kind of involuntary reflex. This isn’t to say that all people from [southern] California use those words or that people who aren’t from [southern] California don’t also use those words, but it is a feature that marks how I talk. As an example, I can remember in high school a group of friends and I noticed how often we use “like” when we talk [“She was like ‘What?’ and I was like ‘No way!’ and everything was like totally weird”] and tried ridding ourselves of this quasi tick by slapping or pinching the person when they used it excessively, kind of like aversion shock therapy or something. From what I recall, this didn’t last longer than like a few days. 

Once I moved to a country where English wasn’t the native language, I had another realization about my accent, namely what it means to sound like an American who speaks German. There are plenty of ways to identify an Ami (German word for American). One tell is when they use the wrong article for a noun (feminine [die] instead of neutral [das] or masculine [der] or masculine instead of feminine, etc). Sometimes using the wrong article is just a charming little mistake that shows you’re still new in the language. But sometimes it can change the meaning of a word all together, which depending on the context could be awkward. Take for example der Erbe (heir) and das Erbe (inheritance), das Schild (a sign) and der Shild (shield or shell [like on a turtle]), or das Steuer (helm, steering wheel, controls) and die Steuer (tax).

Another aspect most English speakers struggle with is the pronunciation of umlauts (ä, ö, ü) as these sounds aren’t present in English. The ä and the ö are by now not a problem for me. But a year and a half later I still struggle with the difference between the ü and u sound, and yet again depending on the word, the difference in pronunciation (with an umlaut or without) is not only perceivable, but could result in a change in word meaning. Take for example drücken versus drucken (push versus print). So this difference isn’t that awkward, and like I said, I have difficulty with the ü sound, so it’s unlikely that I would say “push” instead of “print” while in an office. Another difference, and this one is more noticeable, is between the words schwül and schwul (humid and gay). Unfortunately for me, the word I would use to describe a summer’s day is the more difficult for me to pronounce and I have been corrected on a few occasions for saying, “It’s quite gay today,” when what I was trying to say was, “It’s quite humid today.”


Am I going to make more mistakes as I continue to learn this language? Of course. Will some of them be awkward? You bet. Isn’t that part of the process? Yeah, I think so! Whatever quirk your accent has, embrace it. I have an accent and that’s ok! Don’t let it dissuade you from speaking or learning a new language!