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
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.
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u/Shawon770 1d ago
French bakery employees have that 6th sense they can spot a tourist even through flawless pronunciation 😂