Can You Speak Fake English?

2006-11-23T16:28:00.000-08:00

The title of this site is something of a misnomer; there's no actual Fake English on here (yet).

I've long wondered what 'Fake English' - English as spoken by non-English speakers - sounds like. English speakers can pretend to speak foreign languages which would, obviously, sound like gibberish to native speakers.

But what does Fake English sound like?

In the hope of trying to elicit this from the general internet public, I recorded the above video of myself speaking a bunch of phony, accented gibberish in the style Chinese, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, German and Japanese. So far, the feedback I've got on YouTube has been interesting and encouraging, but there are still no signs of any Fake English!

So, please, if English is your second language, or you know someone who doesn't speak it, please record some Fake English, audio or video, put it on the internet, and let us all know about it here!

Here's the fake dialogue that I wrote for each language. Any similarities to real words are generally coincidental (although, to be fair, I'm familiar to varying degrees with all of them, otherwise it would be hard to fake them - which is why there's no Latvian or Urdu or Navajo on here):

Chinese:
Wo jiao piang xie? Da tian jiang ger pang ma! Xie ming ma chen ge la. Ne fan de shun weng she.

French:
La maricot de la francheuse est la botonnaisse et la botteneuse. Tot pa plattannie? To pa plattonisme. Hein? Noreune les oides terrianal.

Italian:
Della ma groppoforma di papaligia. E fangelli ma trima, costo mosto: agalla mosto. Pi trima, pa trima.

Russian:
Yuvesh boytnik, graznik -- bohpamoshet badnya. Zet yon a yevleskou groynik. Lepni zet bevchenkski.

Spanish:
Los jungames pala muenos. Copa del jumos pi zampistas: pi querames, pi pleyames, pey gustarañes. !Pi taballyama, pi codo¡

German:
Das grumfph ist peine keirschminte, peine greutzenschtepp. Greutzenschtepp ist peine schweirmarke.

Japanese:
Gore no ho kakkamatsu, gun makahashimu jo. Kotero unitasu hanashi ma? Kaitu moroka. Hun.

Here are some other pages (all on Metafilter) that also consider the question of Pretend English without coming up with any definitive answers: