I remember there was this one person who had a pretty typical german accent. She seemed quite unaware of this. I remember her saying “If I had a german accent, I vould talk like tis”

She sounded almost exactly how she normally talked.

I’ve lived in Germany for about four years now, and there is one thing that makes someone sound unmistakably German.

It’s not the way they pronounce <th> and <w>. In IPA, <th> is written /θ/ and /ð/ depending on if it’s unvoiced like the word “thin” and voiced like the word “the”. The technical term is called dental fricatives. The IPA version <w> is simply /w/ and is called the voiced labio-velar approximate.

Although some Germans don’t pronounce them correctly, I’ve found that a decent amount can pronounce them fine. Additionally, these are cross linguistically hard to pronounce letters. Dental fricatives were lost in almost all Germanic languages. Some exceptions are English and Icelandic. And the sound change w -> v is relatively common. Some example is Latin, where <v> originally stood for both /w/ and /u/. In French for instance, it has acquired the modern pronunciation of /v/.

Even in English speaking places, there are places that no longer pronounce <th> as a dental fricatives, such as the Cockney accent or some cities in the united states.

So, these seem more like general hard aspects of English as opposed as something distinctly German.

What Germans do

German has a phonological constraint: every syllable cannot end in voiced obstrucent. When they do have a word that ends in a voiced consonant, such as “Fahrrad”, there is a phonological rule that takes place, namely

C _{[+ obstruent, +voice]} → C _[-voice] /_#

This makes the pronunciation of it become /ˈfaːrˌra(ː)t/, with a /t/ at the end.

You might be thinking, well why don’t they just write it with a /t/ in the spelling? That’s because it’s underlyingly a /d/, you can see it in the plural “Fahrräder”, where it actually is pronounced with a /d/. Only in the singular does final devoicing take place.

Germans frequently apply this to English words, and once you notice it, it’s hard to not notice it.

The same person I mentioned above wanted to talk about a show called “House of Lies”, unfortunately, she called the show “House of Lice” which sounds disgusting.

Want to watch a show about lice in your house?

Final devoicing is a problem in English. Many words differ on only the final phoneme.

There are a lot more.

Additionally, English spelling makese no sense. A lot of words that are written with an <s> are actually pronounced with a /z/.

For instance, the words “has” is a super common word. And so many Germans say it wrong. It should rhyme with “jazz”, but they rhyme it with “pass”. Other words include “is”, “as”, “his”, “because”, “these” which are all pronounced with a /z/.

Another common word is “of”, which is actually pronounced with a /v/ at the end.

Additionally, making the plural and past tense both require a voiced consonant usually. But it will change based on the previous phoneme.

For instance, the plural “dogs” pronounced with a /z/. But the plural “cats” is indeed pronounced with an /s/, because the previous phoneme is /t/.

The past tense “tabbed” is indeed pronounced with a /d/ at the end. But the past tense “tapped” is actually pronounced with a /t/ at the end, because of the previous /p/.

These facts make it quite obvious to tell how German you are. Odds are, you will either encounter a voiced coda word by itself, or be forced to make a plural or past tense in at least some sentences.

There’s a lot of other factors that should also be mentioned, such as the role of vowel length in affecting voicing, why other languages that have final devoicing don’t sound as obvious as in German, and the role of resegmentation. Maybe I will write about it next time.