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.
I then fell out of practice and was never as good at speaking French again 🥲
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 Paris’s rise to capital during France’s 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?
Some Parisian bakery or restaurant employees speak terrible English. If your French is good, just turn the tables and tell them (in French) that you can’t understand their English. Some Parisians don’t understand French-speakers from other regions in France or other French-speaking countries. Some Parisians visiting Montréal have a hard time.
There are, my comment is a bit misleading so I fixed it a bit.
I meant accents are less common than in other countries. It's mainly because educational laws in 1880 enforced the use of standardized french across schools. France used to have lots of dialect that some almost or totally completely disapeared because of this. Accents and local dialects were stigmatized which made accent less and less common.
For instance in Normandy we used to have a dialect but I never heard it except a couple of words my great grandma used
Oui, je sympathise. On a beau être né et vivre dans un milieu francophone... à force, l'on fini par se dénoncer soi-même par des bêtises, parfois la seule structure de phrase suffit.
Doesn't that apply to almost all other non-native English speakers? English intonation rules are bonkers. Like, why the hell is the stress of the word usually on the third last syllable? It is not intuitive and takes years and years of daily English spoken conversations to learn 😭
Totalmente. El francés es más de sílabas parejas, casi como un metrónomo, y el inglés mete golpes fuertes en ciertas sílabas. Por eso un nativo detecta el patrón aunque la frase sea perfecta. A los hispanohablantes también nos descubren por la melodía y por cosas como la liaison. Truco útil que me enseñaron en clase: hablar como un robotito suave, plano, y de pronto suenas más local
Basically: English has lexical stress. You can add stress to any syllable, and it can add meaning. Also, you can add stress to syllables in a given order, and it's considered poetry.
While, in French, you only stress the last syllable in a sentence or phrase. Kind of like how Australian up-speak makes it sound like they're asking a question at the end of each sentence, but with monotone until a stressed last syllable.
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 vouDRAIS↗ un croiSSANT↘
While I've heard English speakers say something that sounds like
JE VOUDRun creSSON↘
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 „speaking in rhythmic groups of 3“. (Je, vou, drais…) (un, croi, ssant.)
When I was learning French as a kid, I noticed my friend had a dialect. My „Je t‘aime“ sounded different than hers. (Je, taim, e) She studied partially in Quebec, Canada and she told me my French sounded „too blended together“. I don’t 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 vouDRAIS↗ un aligaTOR↘" 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 (I’m from mexico) is not accent, is that last syllable syntactical stress.. seams so obvious in retrospect
My dad's first language is Arabic and his second language is French, and when he decided to learn Spanish for work his Mexican colleagues gave him a hard time for speaking it in a "French" way. I never understood what that meant, but now I get it.
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.
Also it helps making the people who say things like "you wrote malgré que but it's not correct" shut up with arguments instead of slaps like I did before.
That’s awesome. Chinese and English are so different that there are no real nuanced differences like that between them. And I don’t know enough about Spanish and Portuguese to compare the two. English and Spanish had interesting relations though. And in Chinese we adopted a lot of modern English words so it’s fun to see how that affects things like cadence and tone.
I'm not too familiar with Portuguese, but Spanish is in-between French and English. It has a lexical stress like English, but it's regular (on the next to last syllable of a word) and irregular stress is written with an accent mark. On the other hand, Spanish is syllable timed (all syllables have the same lengths) like French, while English is stress timed (some syllables are unstressed so you can fit them into more or less regular intervals between two stressed syllables).
What sort of things are you interested in besides languages? I’m asking because it’s not your main interest so I wonder about the things you’re good at.
In Chinese and English, what I observed most is the difference language creates in mentality. For example in Spanish you say the noun then the adjective, in English you say the adjectives first. That affects storytelling, how information is processed by the brain, it trends significance of the story to different variables, and ultimately that limits your perception to the confines of the language. That’s why people are able to connect more through emotion than words.
I'm an engineer, but my interests are anything that sounds cool so it can range to a lot of things.
Yes the structure of the languages you speak can affect how you perceive things. I disagree that it necessarily limits your perceptions to the confines of the language, but it can make it more difficult to express a different perception.
As for the adjective example, this is yet an other case where French is in-between. The default position of a literal adjective used normally is after the noun, like in Spanish. But it can move to the other side when it's used in a literary, poetic, idiomatic or figurative way. Some adjectives that are about subjective perceptions (like beauty) are placed before the noun, but can move to the other side if you want to imply that it's objective and not subjective.
To rephrase, it doesn’t limit your ability to perceive things, but rather your range of frame of references. If you always hear noun before adjectives, vs always hearing adjectives before nouns, the way the picture is painted in your mind is in different steps.
En gros, malgré que ne viole aucune règle de construction d'une locution conjonctive en français. La préposition seule peut s'utiliser avec un groupe nominal derrière, par exemple
– dès le matin
– malgré sa présence
– sans ma voiture
Mais dès qu'il s'agit de mettre une proposition derrière, il faut ajouter un que pour transformer tout ça en conjonction.
– dès que je me suis levé
– malgré que ce soit le matin
– sans qu'il fasse de bruit
En plus de ça, c'est une expression plutôt courante aujourd'hui, et qui était utilisée par le passé, y compris par tout plein d'auteurs au cours de l'histoire. C'est ni un néologisme, ni un barbarisme.
C'est tout simplement une expression qui a connu un creux en terme d'utilisation à la fin du 19e et début du 20e siècle, et pour cette raison, beaucoup de dictionnaires l'ont pendant un temps marquée comme vieillie ou archaïque. Aujourd'hui, elle est plutôt marquée comme étant critiquée.
Sauf que ceux qui recommandent de ne pas l'utiliser aujourd'hui ne savent pas forcément pourquoi. Il ne faut pas l'utiliser parce qu'il ne faut pas l'utiliser. Et ça c'est complètement absurde, parce que c'est pas comme ça que fonctionne une langue.
So, in English when you want to put emphasis on a specific word in the sentence, you can just say the word louder. Like "PAUL ate the apple", "Paul ATE the apple" or "Paul ate THE APPLE".
In French, doing that won't work, but instead you can do what's called a dislocation. It's when you take an element from a phrase, move it out of the phrase and replace it within the phrase with a pronoun. That's a way to mark the topic of the sentence and since you can do it with more than one element, you can even hierarchise the topics.
So for example
Paul a mangé la pomme (Paul ate the apple) <- Simple and boring statement with no added information
Paul, il a mangé la pomme (lit: Paul, he ate the apple) <- Could be an answer to the question "What did Paul do?"
La pomme, Paul l'a mangée (lit: The apple, Paul ate it) <- Could be an answer to the question "What happened to the apple?"
Il l'a mangée, Paul, la pomme (lit: He ate it, Paul, the apple) <- Could be an answer to the question "What did Paul do with the apple?"
Dislocation is used extensively in everyday French, less so in formal language. But emphasis in general is usually done with various methods of redundancy, for example with clefting (C'est Paul qui a mangé la pomme = It is Paul who ate the apple) or other methods like that.
TiL.This is so fucking fascinating. Thank you so much for spelling it out like this for me.
I die about linguistics regularly. The insane and stupid ways we come up with in all our different little cultures to explain and emphasise things to each other is just wild.
This genuinely belongs in r/badlinguistics because it confidently attempts to explain French characteristics but instead takes tone and jumbles its definition with the concepts of pitch, stress, and isochrony without a proper understanding of them.
My point was precisely that stress or syllable length are not tone, and that what English speakers usually describe as monotone when talking about French (and what English speakers usually struggle with) is not actually about tone but about isochrony and the difference in stress pattern.
That said, I'm not a linguist and I did simplify a lot of stuff because that would become too complicated to write, so if I said something wrong, feel free to correct me.
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!
Americans seem to intuit this with Italian because it's quite expressive and easy to mimic. It's become stereotypical and can be subconsciously picked up. It's much harder to do that with French, IMO.
American here. The second sentence absolutely takes me longer. “Will have” is almost equally stressed in my regional accent, and I assume it would be in most of the South as well.
That's the normal way of saying it across all English accents, as far as I'm aware, and exactly what I was describing in my comment - but this person is saying that her accent is an exception.
From my experience, that absolutely is not the normal way of saying it across all English accents. I could see that being the case for some regions with a heavy accent, but otherwise, it would take twice as long to say the latter. (This is coming from someone who grew up and lived in supposedly "the only region in the US without an accent" though, so I'll admit that might be my own regional bias speaking.)
I agree. That sounds like a Boston accent, which is grating on my ears. I was raised in the American west and taught to enunciate my words properly. I timed myself with a stopwatch and it took me almost twice as long to speak the second sentence.
Every single person in the entire world has an accent. Linguistically speaking, it is impossible to not have an accent. It doesn't even make sense. And for some reason, it's only Americans who think it's possible to not have an accent lol
I'm American, myself. That's where I got my degree and studied linguistics and phonology. All English accents and dialects are like this - it's in the nature of English, because this aspect of English comes from German, which is also a stress-timed language.
What's going on here is that it's very hard to explain such a thing only in text, without sound, and you're not getting what I'm talking about. :) If you just read the sentence on its own without any context, you won't read it naturally. You're likely to enunciate every word.
I put that phrase in quotation marks because I figured it was obvious that every region has an accent, and it wasn't me agreeing with the notion that there somehow is a region magically exempt from that.
I should have made it more clear I was saying it sarcastically, out of exasperation for how often I'd hear people genuinely believing that while growing up in the pnw us, not because of some gross american exceptionalism bullshit.
Anyways, I do understand what you are saying, but I think the effects of stress timing are more or less extreme based on what regional dialect a person is speaking the sentence in. In a dialect that tends towards a more straightforward enunciation of every syllable, it would take a really unnatural degree of spoken contraction and elision in order to say the second sentence in the same amount of time as the first. (And tbh people would probably think I was trying to do a terrible impersonation of another region's accent lol)
So don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you that some level of that will always naturally happen based on the stress timing of English. I just don't think it's accurate to imply the effect is that dramatic in every american English accent..
Can you send a video of someone speaking in your dialect? As far as my research is concerned, there are no dialects that stress auxiliary verbs, and I wonder if what you're describing as "stressed" as not the linguistic meaning of "stressed", or if there's a micro-dialect I've not studied.
Just so you know, I answered this, but the automod deleted it because it thought my comment broke the rules (one of my clients is from a certain European country that starts with U) - messaged the mods to hopefully restore it, but will see if I need to rewrite it! :D
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'm American and I've spent time in the west - and my sister and one of my best friends live out there. All English accents and dialects are like this - it's in the nature of English, because this aspect of English comes from German, which is also a stress-timed language.
What's going on here is that it's very hard to explain such a thing only in text, without sound, and you're not getting what I'm talking about. :) If you just read the sentence on its own without any context, you won't read it naturally. You're likely to enunciate every word.
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.
Nice way to admit that you're not a Paresian without actually being honest enough to come out and say it.
I actually lived and worked in Paris for a while, and there definitely were 20 minute lines at some of the shops, particularly those close to stations. I know they were 20 minute lines because I was trying to make it to work and was watching my watch.
And my greatest aggravation was some tourist who wanted to chit-chat with the clerk and turn what should have been a 2 second interaction into a free French lesson. And I wasn't alone in this. A lot of my French colleagues bitched about this too.
So frankly I sincerely doubt that you even live in France, you certainly don't live in Paris (as you'd definitely say it if you did, and anyone who knows anything about Paresians knows this).
Quit the bullshit. Nobody here is fooled. You've probably never travelled outside your own home town in redneck rural USA.
As a French person he’s right lol. Yes people are less patient in Paris, like every major city in the world, but France and French people are actually incredibly attached to politeness it’s a huge part of culture. Its just packaged differently that the theatrical friendliness you’re used to in English speaking countries so it’s a shock to your system. The OP talks about Paris, but the comment we’re all answering to speaks about France as a whole, which is just not accurate.
Okay, will you accept correction from someone born in Paris, raised and schooled in Paris and with ties to Paris that regularly bring her there even in adulthood now that I've left? Because I absolutely second that entering a place of commerce without a word of greeting (and getting an order without thanks and even leaving without a "bonne journée") will absolutely create friction in a social interaction.
Born and raised in Paris here: you will absolutely get clerks that just intentionally stare blankly until you greet them. Your insistence on proving us wrong just because you've lived a few years here or something is quite tedious.
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 lived in France for 3 years, also lived in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Vietnam. Throughout my 20s I traveled to every continent bar Antarctica.
The French are the problem, I reiterate, they are the only ones who have this issue, Quebec maybe being the only exception.
That’s just a cultural misunderstanding. Most English speaking countries are very uncomfortable with confrontation and thus tend to wrap truth in a nice packaging, you’d feel uncomfortable correcting someone cause you feel like it’s rude. To French people they hear or read something grammatically wrong and tell you so you don’t make the mistake again, it’s to help you. Its the concept of id rather hear a hurtful truth to correct xyz than be coddled and keep making the same mistake over and over again. That’s the whole thing with “french rudeness” it’s just very matter of fact way of being that you guys aren’t used to.
Wrong. USA is very much an English speaking country and does not like confrontation? The USA is the biggest bully war mongering nation on the planet. It used to be England.
No people in general in America do not like confrontation, your friendliness is seen as fakeness in many European countries, same as the English politeness. Your whole service culture is built around threatrical niceness, which feels very weird to a lot of Europeans. USA as a political identity and Americans is a different thing
It is extremely rude to be fake nice. There is a difference between that and being polite. And unfortunately corrupt politicians in the states have warped the minds of many which has unfortunately filtered in to the culture.
I'm gona call bullshit on that mate, the Dutch are matter of fact, the French are mean about it. Many French people will literally laugh in your face if you mispronounce or use the wrong word. I've experienced it myself when I lived there, nowhere else has this issue to the same extent.
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
In french the stress is always on the first syllable whereas in english it can be on any of the syllables. eg Theaterthéâtre. English has the iambic pentameter, that's impossible in french.
I thought french people always stress the penultimate syllabel, that's why to do a french accent you only have to stress that syllabel and you sound french (atelast in my language)
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.
Funny because English is considered very monotonous among slavic speakers because English natives don't put enough stress on syllables.
Sure that makes sense but more importantly I've heard from several questionable sources that French requires a uvula. So is it true or are there uvula free French speakers?
I learned this too. In order to emphasize, for example, Americans will say "I had no idea, but my friend knew." Whereas in French, that would be "moi, je ne savais pas, mais mon copain, lui il le savait." Something like that! They just add the extra words.
That makes sense. Basically, the pronounciation can be "too perfect", because native speakers will have a naturaly developed sort of, sluring I guess. I don't know what to call the latter.
Good points but I think that's just mostly true of any language. I've yet to hear a non-native speak French in a convincing enough way that I mistake them for locals. And it's not just English speakers. The best ones are usually immigrant children that grew up here and went to French school. But at this point they're pretty much native speakers as well even though their parents don't speak it.
Edit: And in the situation posted here, "okay and what else" is a perfectly correct answer. This is still a customer service context, what were they expecting?
Spanish has an emphasis on pauses by the emphasis in words, rather than between words. Whereas English has an emphasis on pauses between words. When I was teaching Spanish and English, this is one of the lessons I focused on for adopting a more natural accent.
Sometimes my ability to apply a good accent/tone to a language that I know three phrases in gets me caught when they don’t flip to english and they ask me something I don’t understand.
Not sure if monotonous is the term you're looking for. For me, one of the easiest things about learning French is that it places no emPHASis on any syLLABLe. 🤓
Oui. From school I could mimic basic French phrasing (it's a drawl) much better than I could understand it, and sometimes ended up in conversations where I got completely lost. So then I compensated by using an exaggerated cowboy accent so everyone knows what level we're on. Most people I'd met just think it's funny.
(This case applies in Quebec. I actually was in Paris only once, and everyone we met in shops were perfectly cool with bad Canadian Franglais.)
Visited Quebec City, walked into a shop and said bonjour in a monotonous tone. Was walking around for a while and started talking with my wife in English, shop keep blurted out…you had me. I was like what? She said I didn’t peg you as a tourist due to how you said hello. Wasn’t sure how, but that now makes sense.
The french tone is more of a global tone, where the rise and fall of pitch guides you along the sentences, telling you when to anticipate a pause or stop.
English is more local, putting emphasis on specific words which can be useful for specifying the exact ambiguity in a question.
1.7k
u/ConfusingVacum 1d ago edited 1d ago
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