Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images
Topics: TikTok, Social Media
Britt Jones
If you’re a native English speaker, you’ve probably never thought about how your language sounds to others.
For us Brits, English is all we’ve ever known (unless you’re bilingual) and the way we sound makes total sense.
But if you didn’t know what each other were saying, you might think differently.
Our cadence, accents, and word orthography, is largely unique, considering English stemmed from Latin and Old Germanic influences.
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When we hear other languages spoken, there’s something lovely about the different word profiles, but we might become desensitised to that once learning to speak it.
So, we tend to go about our lives without the knowledge of how our language sounds to others - until now.
A TikTok and YouTube video has demonstrated what we really sound like and people have been left in disbelief.
The TikTok video is titled, ‘How English Sounds To Non English Speakers’, and you can hear it for yourself here:
So my first thought (and many of the comments also agreed) was that we sound like Sims characters.
To others, they felt it sounded ‘annoying’ or ‘unreal’.
One person wrote: “As a non English speaker this is accurate.”
A second said: “We sound so annoying.”
Someone else commented: “So you’re telling me we just sound like Sims.”
Some people desperately wanted others to confirm if this was real, with one asking: “There’s no way this is true can someone confirm.”
Sadly, another user wrote: “As a non English speaker I can confirm this is what I hear.”
As for the YouTube video, which shows a couple navigating making and eating dinner as they talk gibberish, you can actually see how this could be English - apart from the fact you can’t understand a single thing they’re saying.
English speakers were so confused because it sounds like something you should be able to understand, but the words make no sense.
One YouTube user penned: “My brain is so confused... it's like it can almost understand but not quite and it doesn't know what to do.”
Another added: “The little singular words like ‘today’, ‘good’, and ‘sure’ are enough to gaslight me into thinking this is actual english.”
And a final user joked: “This is like when someone’s having a conversation in another room and you’re not really tuning into it but still hearing their words.”
It’s weird, and it’s so accurate it’s almost scary.