{"id":2490,"date":"2010-06-21T06:40:20","date_gmt":"2010-06-21T05:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=2490"},"modified":"2010-06-21T06:40:20","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T05:40:20","slug":"estuary-german","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/estuary-german\/","title":{"rendered":"Estuary German"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lena Meyer-Landrut’s weird English pronunciation<\/a> (only when she’s singing – when she talking, it’s just normal mediocre school English<\/a>) has attracted some attention.<\/p>\n

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I’ve tried to transcribe the beginning of the song:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
I went everywhere for you<\/td>\na? w?nt ?f??w?? f? ju?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
I even did my hair for you<\/td>\na? i?v?n d?d ma? h??? f? j??<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
I bought new underwear, they\u2019re blue<\/td>\na? b??t nu? and?w??, \u00f0a? blu?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
And I wore ’em just the other day<\/td>\n?n ? w?r?m d??st \u00f0? ?\u00f0? da?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Love, you know I\u2019ll fight for you<\/td>\nl?v, ju? n?? a?l fa?t f? ju?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
I left on the porch light for you<\/td>\na? l?ft ?n d? p??t? la?t f? ju?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whether you are sweet or cruel<\/td>\nw?\u00f0? ju? a? swi?t ?? k?u?(l)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
I\u2019m gonna love you either way<\/td>\na?m ??n? l?v ju? i?\u00f0? we?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Love, oh, love, I gotta tell you how I feel about you<\/td>\nl?v ?? l?v a? ??t? t?l ju? ha? a? fi?l ?baut ju?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
‘Cause I, oh, I can\u2019t go a minute without your love<\/td>\nk?z a? \u00f8? ai kan ??? ? m?n?t wi\u00f0a?t ju? l?v<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Some people (at least in Germany and Denmark) have been trying to defend her pronunciation by claiming she’s singing in Cockney (by which I guess they mean Estuary English<\/a>), but that’s a misunderstanding.<\/p>\n

It’s true that many native Londoners would pronounce ‘day’ in a way close to [da?], but like all other native speakers of English, they would make it rhyme with ‘way’, which should in this accent be [wa?], not [we?].<\/p>\n

In the same way, no matter what accent of English you’re trying to speak, you should use the same vowel\/diphthong in ‘oh’ and ‘go’.<\/p>\n

Also, no variety of English that I know of conflates the vowels in ‘light’ and ‘day’. In Scottish English, they are [??] and [e]; in RP, they are [a?] and [e?]; and in Estuary English, they might be [??] and [??]. The main thing is they’re always different.<\/p>\n

Finally, of course there are features of a London accent that she hasn’t copied at all – for instance, her \/l\/s and \/r\/s sound very German to me.<\/p>\n

So this is not a case of a German who sings in Cockney; it’s a case of a German schoolgirl with mediocre English who’s copied pronunciations at random from songs she’s listened to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lena Meyer-Landrut’s weird English pronunciation (only when she’s singing – when she talking, it’s just normal mediocre school English) has attracted some attention. I’ve tried to transcribe the beginning of the song: I went everywhere for you a? w?nt ?f??w?? f? ju? I even did my hair for you a? i?v?n d?d ma? h??? f? j?? I bought new underwear, they\u2019re blue a? b??t nu? and?w??, \u00f0a? blu? And I wore ’em just the other day ?n ? w?r?m d??st \u00f0? ?\u00f0? da? Love, you know I\u2019ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158,159,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-de","category-en","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}