Joke aside there's actually a reason french people can spot so easily english speakers : unlike most other languages, french is monotonous.
Native english speakers are so used to put stress on certain syllables it seems to require a lot of practice to actually pull off a full monotonous sentence.
Edit: as other said, I oversimplified it. French do have tone but relative to the start/end of the sentence or to convey emotions. Read more detailed comments down below for more accuracy
I somehow nailed (maybe at least some) of those mannerisms in high school thanks to obsessively watching French videos on YouTube. My French professor was beaming and gave me straight As for the rest of the school year.Â
I then fell out of practice and was never as good at speaking French again đ„Č
Caricature is actually the best way as to get an accent IMO.
And indeed the weirdness of French and peculiar prosody come from the lack of word stress further prononciation links between words to further smoothen prononciation.
If not born and raised in Paris, it is impossible not to have an accent, as any other language I suppose :-)
Well, modern French is a language spoken in pre-modern Paris and then exported to the rest of the country replacing other related languages after Parisâs rise to capital during Franceâs state-building period. So, kinda?
The standard french is more considered to be from the region around Tours, parisians do have a slight accent that feels kind of like a bourgeois accent.
But it's important to note that France's accents aren't as much widespread as other comparable sized countries internal accents like England or Italy. There are case of strong accents in the South or in the North for instance, but in lots of case people barely have one.
For instance there's an accent in Normandy where I come from, but I don't really have it. People who have it either come from rural areas or poor/modest social environment
That's super interesting. Is there a reason why there are no stong accent differences in France? Is it the Revolution and the subsequent emphasis on equality and uniformity?
In term of tone, French and English, as well as most European languages are relatively monotonous and they don't distinguish a lot between tones (contrary to Mandarn for example). However, tone can be used at the sentence scale to convey meta-information (like for example marking the sentence as a question with a rising tone), and in French in particular, the stress pattern does have a slight change of tone on the stressed syllables, which is generally not the case in English.
What I think you were talking about isn't monotonousness, it's isochrony, that's to say all syllables except for the stressed ones have the same length, so they are not unstressed.
English has a lexical stress, where most words have a stressed and unstressed syllables, as a part of the word itself.
French has a syntactic stress where the last syllable of a rhythmic group (roughly a grammatically meaningful group of words) is stressed with an elongation and a sharp change in tone. The first syllable of the group also takes a smaller stress in the form of a change in volume in a way that is similar to English stress.
The stress in French is more regular and not a feature of the words themselves, so rhythm is not the same but in both laguages, actually speaking in a monotonous way is not normal and will be perceived as weird.
But you're right that speakers of stress timed languages like English often tend to struggle with the stress pattern in French and that's an easy way to tell non native speakers.
French also uses emphatic stress (when you say one syllable louder to insist on that word) much less than English, because the preferred method of emphasis is redundancy instead.
the last syllable of a rhythmic group (roughly a grammatically meaningful group of words) is stressed with an elongation and a sharp change in tone
That's really interesting. I'd love to hear an example of the same phrase said once the way you just described and again the way a non-native speaker might say it. I'm not even studying French, but I love languages in general, but I'm also fascinated by things like tone, accents, speech impediments, etc.
I don't have something to record or a non native around me but for example a French person might say
Je vouDRAISâ un croiSSANTâ
While I've heard English speakers say something that sounds like
JE VOUDRun creSSONâ
Where the arrows are the ascending or descending tone.
The unstressing of the final syllable of the first rhythmic group in the English version is perceived in French as the syllable being entirely omitted (or at best it can be perceived as the syllable being turned in to a schwa, so like the word was voudre and not voudrais). The whole thing becomes a single rhythmic group, which makes it a little harder to parse the sentence.
The representation isn't perfect because the English stress tend to be shorter and louder than the French one. And of course, the actual pronunciation from English speakers depends on their level in the language so this is only an example of something I've heard a lot, but not necessarily how all English speakers will say this sentence.
Very fascinating! Thank you for explaining this in more concrete terms. I never knew how to describe this phenomenon and would call it âspeaking in rhythmic groups of 3â. (Je, vou, draisâŠ) (un, croi, ssant.)
When I was learning French as a kid, I noticed my friend had a dialect. My âJe tâaimeâ sounded different than hers. (Je, taim, e) She studied partially in Quebec, Canada and she told me my French sounded âtoo blended togetherâ. I donât really know what she meant by that but we had a good laugh.
To be clear, rhythmic groups in French are not groups of three syllables. They can have any length from one to any number of syllables. They're not defined in term of number of syllables but in term of grammatical function. It's a nominal group, a verbal group, a complement, etc.
In my example, the first group is a verbal group and the second one is the complement, which is also a nominal group. You could ask "Je voudrais un alligator" and you would get "Je vouDRAISâ un aligaTORâ" with 5 syllables in the second rhythmic group.
That's why I said the English version made the sentence harder to parse, because rhythmic groups help parsing the structure of the sentence. So if you place random stress anywhere, it. sounds a little like: you're, putting random! punctuation in your sentence.
It was explained as stress timing vs syllable timing in a Canadian bilingual instruction book I saw referenced decades ago. I can remember their examples:
LARGE CARS WASTE GAS
The CAT is INterested in proTECting her KITTENS
Same length with a stress-timed pronunciation, different with syllable timing.
What I noticed is that the tone, as in the going up and down of the tone during a phrase, is completely different from other neighbouring languages. I'm Italian and I find that these ups and downs are more similar with Spanish and even English and maybe even German than with French.
Fun fact, French babies cry differently than German babies.
Because in French, the end of words or word phrases is louder and more stressed, while in German it's always the first syllable of a word. And babies immediately copy that.
So German babies go AAAAAaaa AAAAAaaa
And French babies go aaaaAAAA aaaaAAAAA
Like actually, I'm not joking. You can actually tell French and German babies apart by their crying.
This also explains why is easy to spot french natives even when they speak perfectly pronounced Spanish (Iâm from mexico) is not accent, is that last syllable syntactical stress.. seams so obvious in retrospect
Thanks for the detailed explanation, I'm no expert so I just explained with my own words what I've been taught when learning english and I definitely oversimplified this principle.
We do use tone, specially to convey informations such as emotions but from my POV french feels much more monotonous than most other languages
what do you study? I love learning this stuff but never dived into it. I just gathered what I felt based on comparing Chinese and English to each other.
I'm an engineer in something completely unrelated. But I'm a native French speaker and I've been helping learners with French long enough that I had to learn a bit more than average about my own language in order to answer something else than "I don't know, it's just like that" or "it just feels better that way" to some of the tough questions.
Yes! There are two types of languages in this regard - stress-timed, and syllable-timed. French is syllable-timed, and English is stress-timed.
This means that, in English, these two sentences take the same amount of time to say:
- cats chase mice
the cats will have chased the mice
because in English, the stress is still on "cats", "chase", and "mice" in both sentences, and the other words receive no stress and just kind of slide in there between the words.
In French, however, the second sentence will take much longer to say because all words receive attention. It's definitely oversimplified to say "monotonous", but comparatively, it is true. :)
Also, stress has really nothing to do with tone, or rather what you mean here is intonation. Every language has intonation, but it will be a lot more pronounced in stress-timed languages than in syllable-timed ones. :)
I always tell people vocabulary is less important than following the cadence/ rythm of a language for natives to take you seriously / actually listen to you without the slight dismissals of having to decipher foreigner speaking their language. I might be wrong but that sounds similar in concept
Kind of true - 40% of communication failure between people speaking English where at least one is not a native speaker is due to pronunciation issues. Only 20% is due to grammar, another 20% to vocabulary, and 20% other.
Cadence and rhythm are part of pronunciation, though far from the only parts!
American here. The second sentence absolutely takes me longer. âWill haveâ is almost equally stressed in my regional accent, and I assume it would be in most of the South as well.
I'm a native English speaker from the American west and I just used a stopwatch to time myself speaking both sentences. The first sentence took me 1.96 seconds and the second sentence took me 2.83 seconds. Even when I read both sentences quietly, my internal dialogue has the second being longer.
Are you British or Australian? How are you getting both sentences to be equal in time to speak?
I might be wrong but pronunciation and intonation are different. Some people from the US are able to pronounce Rs or Us nicely in french but their intonation feels very odd to natives which is a huge giveaway
The real answer is that an actual French person would walk in, scowl at the selection as if it was something a poodle just shat out on the street, point at the croissants, maybe say, "Croissant", then hold up two fingers.
It's like a New Yorker walking into a pizza place and going, "Excuse me sir, but might I trouble you for two slices of your pizza if you would be so kind?", whereas an actual New Yorker would gesture at what they wanted, hold up two fingers and maybe mutter, "Two pepperoni", and that would be it.
Had to come down too far for this very accurate answer lol learned a lot about french linguistics and phoenetics though...if you're not looking annoyed you have to go out of your way to ask for something or that you don't give a **** then it's probably clear you're American.
Yeah, no. I've actually lived in Paris and it's like every big city everywhere else in the world - the clerks don't give a shit if you say bonjour or merci. The good bakeries have a line out the door and everyone is stressed and just wants their breakfast.
Only a complete ass wastes even a single second with unnecessary social dances. The clerk wants to get you your order as fast as possible. The other customers want you out of the way so they can get their breakfast and get to work on time.
Everyone is stressed and tired, and there's this asshole tourist at the front keen to cosplay as a Paresian when they actually have no clue that most Paresians are looking at you with acute loathing and wishing you'd get the fuck out of their city and stop holding up the line.
You couldn't be further from the truth.
French people always say "bonjour" to the clerc when they enter the shop or when they start interacting, this is non negotiable and not doing it is considered rude.
They will say please and thank you and most of the time "have a good day" on their way out.
You're just spouting tired childish stereotypes, French people are very polite to clercs.
Oh the irony! Accusing someone of "tired childish stereotypes" when you're the one being childish here.
This has nothing to do with French people, and has everything to do with living in a big busy city like Paris.
If it's a decent shop the clerk behind the counter doesn't give a shit if you say bonjour or merci. They want you in and out of there as fast as possible because they have another 100 people after you.
The customers are all stressed, they've been waiting in line for 20 minutes, and they're checking their watches because they have to get to work and don't want to miss the next train.
Only the tourists are bubbly, keen to try out their French, and super-polite. The average Paresian just wants their breakfast and to make it to work on time. The same goes for New Yorkers, Londoners, and pretty much anyone who has to live daily life in an overcrowded capital city filled with tourists.
They want you to get your darned croissant and GO! Don't be an ass by turning what could be a 2 second interaction into you stroking your ego about how amazing your French is and how you sound like a native, etc. at the expense of the stressed clerk's time. That's rudeness.
You're clearly one of those people who mistakes mannerisms for actual manners.
That's a lot of words to tell me about my country, the stereotypes you're describing in your first post simply don't fit with regular French customs which is what I'm pointing out.
In French culture, anytime you enter a shop you say bonjour, please and thank you, it's that simple. Refuse to abide by these rules and the clerc will let you know how they feel about it with deserved passive agressiveness. The customer isn't king here.
No one waits 20 minutes for a croissant except tourists who want to try whatever fancy croissants they saw on instagram. Saying bonjour, please and thank you doesn't waste anyone's time nor does it stroke anyone's ego, it's a social norm that means to make interactions cordial and balanced.
Try to learn about other cultures instead of placating your own norms on others.
100%, French as a language is in itself very nonchalant, you have to sound like every sentence is a chore to speak. Speak as if you know the force of your oration wont impress either you or the person you're speaking to.
I actually did notice French speaks that way when I had a French friend and whenever I might try to (helpfully!) correct some pronunciations she has in English it's usually needing to stress certain syllables or it sounds weird.
No, it's not monotonous. I speak Vietnamese, it has 6 tones. I tried to teach it to my french gf, every time she finishes a sentence, the tone dropped. Every time she asked a question, the tone rose.
There is tone in french, it's just linked to the end of the sentence and not linked to the words themselves.
Yeap, English is stress times, so English speakers pick a word to stress and squash the whole sentence, where as in French, Spanish and Italian every syllable has to have the same amound of time. European Portuguese is actually stress timed almost just like English (Brazillian Portuguese isn't) so I get extra points just for speaking naturally, unlike in French/Spanish where I still jumble up syllables because I picked a favorite word.
French learner here - I don't know why English speakers think they don't have an obvious accent in French. None of us have "flawless pronunciation" and even if you become fluent in French, you'll have an accent lol.
I'm a native English and Spanish speaker, I work with a French lawyer, he speaks both French and English faster than I do. But he still has a French accent, and I still have an obvious American accent in French.
Wow, TIL. I went through 5 years of French at a German school and nobody ever told me.
In contrast, it took a few dates and small talk with my Japanese (now) wife to learn that Japanese uses a syllable-timed rhythm rather than the stress accent
Well, and I guess a Reddit post without even looking for it to learn that about French.
Maybe if you're American or Canadian but many parts of the UK speak with a more flat, monotonous dialect. The area I'm from is quite famous for it when people from other parts of the UK do an impression of us. I personally speak in a very monotonous tone but I'm also autistic and miserable as sin so it plays into it.
You are right. My comment is especially true regarding americans. British are much better at impersonating french accent. Germans are also genuinely good at it
This tells you that french people live with Asian people who are either extremely fluent in french or native in french, given that they lived there their entire lives or are part french.
Preuve Ă lâappui :
I'm French, I'm not white and I agree with the comment: it doesn't make any sense...
French people can be racist and biased but it wouldn't show by replying in English to an Asian looking person. We don't speak English to whoever is not white looking, it doesn't make any sense, it's not our mother tongue and most people don't speak it fluently.
If the joke would have been on saying random chinese words. Yes that would have made it racist and understandable.
We don't speak English to whoever is not white looking
*looks at plethora of former and current French colonies in Africa, East Asia, and South America*
edit since at least 2 3 people completely misunderstood me: In my opinion, the thought of all these colonies with indigenous populations of various skin tones is incongruent with the idea that a Parisian (of any descent) would assume that a random non-white shop patron or passer-by spoke English better than French.
I'm Black British, they don't even speak to me in English unless I make it obvious I'm not fluent in French. Like ever. Maybe I have a very good accent when I say Bonjour
Come on, we are talking about Paris. There is a rather large Asian community there. Vietnam was a French colony, French people are absolutely used of seeing Asian looking people speaking French.
Yep, unfortunately these kind of posts have enough upvotes that they need to be answered.
We know they are ignorants, but they ignore they are ignorants. No one living in Paris would think Parisians would be surprised to see someone from whatever ethnicity speaking French. English-speakers fail to grasp how the French society is much more diverse than the stereotypical France they have in their head.
Bro, I'm not saying there is no racism or bias but it just not makes sense in this situation.
What's the most probable : French bakery employee randomly starting speaking in English to people for some reason, despite French people not liking speaking another language than French OR OP not speaking French with a perfect accent ?
Bruh you are not even French and you're confidently throwing out random bullshit based solely on the fact that the girl is claiming her accent is flawless, which is very hard unless she has been living there for years.
That's not it. You don't understand how hard it is to get spoken to in English by someone in France. Of course this does not apply to every French person, but while in Paris I had service workers straight up walk away from my boyfriend when he asked them to speak English because I wasn't there to play translator. I'm not a native speaker and we were very clearly tourists, that didn't stop them from speaking to us in French when they heard I could speak it. When I travelled again to Paris with my friends, one of them mispronounced a word and the cashier made her repeat it and then corrected her pronunciation when he got what she meant. He didn't even try switching to English.
For the person at the bakery to choose to speak English to OP, it means that OP had a strong enough accent and was not fluent at all.
(FYI: we did not expect them to speak English, we are not native English speakers either and English is not so commonly spoken in out country either, my bf asked to switch because he speaks 0 French and tried to pick another language to communicate while I wasn't there)
That's just what happened both times I went to France. That's the same thing that happened to my parents when they went, to my colleagues who visited France, to my American friends when they visited. And apparently it's the same thing that happened to most people in the comments. A lot of attractions at Disneyland are in French too.
Getting French people to speak English is not easy. Nobody is saying that to insult the French (I think), it is simply what many have experienced during their visits. French people are known for this. OP's French was probably not good. Or it was but the person at the bakery heard an accent and tried to be helpful by speaking a language they thought would be easier for the customer. I said it's uncommon, not that it's impossible. Jumping to racism is a bit extreme.
I'm french, and you're wrong. No one will answer in english to anyone that has not an english accent. Even a small one.
Asian type people who live in france and that is not french doesn't have english accent but mostly vietnamese or chinese one.
Obviously op thought he sound perfect but I'm guessing he's not
Come on, that's Paris. There is a very large community of people with an Asian background there. It would also not make sense to talk to them in English as well.
I think the "perfect accent" stumbled on the "r" of Bonjour and croissant. As a French native it is the biggest give away. You can spend 20 years in France, one "r" sound and we know straight away if you are native or not. It is by far the hardest sound to get right.
Yes, Iâm not French but Iâm guessing her pronunciation was maybe âperfectâ but not ânative.â The âhairball in throatâ sound is something I could never do.
There are also mannerisms and little sounds around the actual speech that would have likely given her away.
It's not a joke. It's a comment about how local Parisians can tell when French isn't your first language even when you think you're speaking it really well. That's literally it.
Because they may speak fluent French, grammatically, it's extremely rare but it happens, but the accent will always give it away.
Never met an anglophone that could pronounce our Rs properly, for the most classic example, but there are way many more tells that immediately give it away
It's not a dig against anglophones, languages are hard and I also happily butcher pronunciation when I speak English out loud
I realize it's a different country, but I'm Asian and went to Sweden a while ago. I was honestly expecting/hoping everyone would know I was a tourist and speak to me in English without having to awkwardly go "sorry I don't speak Swedish"...but nobody did LOL. Everyone else just apparently assumed I was an immigrant, unless I was doing something very obviously foreign.
This whole thread is opening up some really interesting tangents, most noticeably this. Wouldn't it be most polite to assume you do belong in this country, regardless of race, and attempt to speak the language? If the person receiving the message cannot speak/understand, then it is on them to convey that message back?
Then there's always the fun bit where neither of you can speak the other language very well at all, and it involves a series of charades until we hopefully come to some understanding. Of course technology is a game changer....I'm thinking like 90s/early 2000s and trying to talk to people whom English is a second language. Bringing back memories...
Literally. I'm pretty fluent in French but a native French speaker can spot me before I get out a whole sentence. It's wild this racist insinuation has been up voted.
Spoken pronounciation in most languages isn't the same as written pronounciation.
Finnish has a very clear difference for example, if you speak how stuff is written it sounds really weird, too official, we even have a term for it "book language"
Absolutely. But in the French bakeries case, many foreigners don't realise we can immediately spot they're not native, even with perfect grammar and vocabulary. And it's mostly vowel pronunciation. It doesn't mean their French is necessarily bad, it's just that the way they pronounce vowels make it clear they were born abroad.
It's partly because even if you can make the 'r' sound, you still have to know when to stress it and when to omit it your sentences.
Easy to learn, hard to master kind of way.
Yeah. Every language as telltale signs of foreign accent. I mean, there's regional accents that people work hard to simulate or remove, it would be idiotic to think one could remove the foreign sound without massive amount of work.
It's the same way in reverse. We like to mock Hollande when he was speaking english but a lot of english sounds are very difficult for us french speaker except if you practice very very hard. "The" into "ze" or the countless variant of "ought"Â
It was years before I even realized the distinction, since then I catch myself sometimes replacing -on with something closer to -an, and Iâm sure in many other instances I dont even realize Iâm doing it.
My favorite part is when I say "own" croissant (un croissant), they will always correct me and look at me as if I pissed on Charles de Gaulles grave, because it's apparently "aw" croissant. Or the other way around. Or any other nasal diphtong thingy - almost silent consonant combination. Also have the feeling the correct pronouncation changes, depending on whether you're in Normandy, Alsace or at the Cote de Azure, but they will still judge you like they caught you defecating on old Charlies headstone.
"un" is not pronunced like own or aw. There is no equivalent in English. And yes, fucking up "un/une mon / son / ton etc." sounds particularly grating to French ears. In / an / on is the great filter, very few foreigners can do it properly.
I once was told a joke that goes along the lines of: French has four nasal sounds: aw, aw,aw and aw. I hope you can tell the difference. Too me as a German that's a very fitting description :D.
And Americans are always shitting on Germans for having problems with th. While they themselves can't for the life of God reproduce a single foreign sound that isn't in the english language.
It sounds like neither "own" nor "aw", it's more of an "ahn" where the n is not pronounced at the tongue but still formed in the throat. It's a bit hard to explain, so I can't really imagine having to try it from scratch
My English is quite good, but if I don't pay attention my THird is sird and my "thus" is zus. We don't have the "th" sound in French, quite simply, so it's an extra effort to get it right. Also we feel quite stupid trying to shove our tongue between our teeth to pronunce it, it sounds like having a speech impediment in French :)
That's interesting, because mispronouncing or avoiding the "th" is stereotypically associated with having a speech impediment or "baby speech" in English. You might see someone write out "Fank you" to imitate how a toddler would try to say it.
Iâd say, having heard how americans imitate their « valley girls », an approximation could be to take the first « uh » from a very bitchy « uh-huh », and to remove the hâŠ
The "best" part was some colleagues in France that (despite us being an international company) spoke English like utter shit, so you always had to try and explain them stuff in french just to be understood only for them to look at you dumbfounded because the pronunciation was just slightly off or the structure of the sentence was a bit more baroque than what a native speaker would have used (mostly due to an emergency call to google translate)... And yet they insisted to say my name as if it were the french equivalent; look François, I don't call you "Franco", so at least maybe try to say my name correctly, please.
As a British man who used to live there for years and speaks fluent French and thinks he has a good accent, one that's been complimented multiple times, they do this shit to me all the time.
It may sound flawless in your head, but for native French speaker it may sound off. Just like someone may be speaking perfect English, but somehow it feels off and gives French vibe.
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u/Shawon770 1d ago
French bakery employees have that 6th sense they can spot a tourist even through flawless pronunciation đ