The Harshness of the German Language: Beyond Sound and Stereotype
Niamh Sayers
Languages are not simply collections of sounds. Each one of them is de facto bound up with cultural assumptions and perceptions, both internal and external. For example, French and Spanish are, to a native English speaker, the languages of love. Russian is associated with spies and mystery. And German is a harsh, martial language, used by people who bark orders and drink beer all day –– isn’t it?
We have all seen the viral videos comparing the lightness of the French papillon to the comparatively aggressive-sounding German Schmetterling. When telling people I study German at university, two of the most common reactions have been an impression of the language that I can only really compare to the noises my neighbours’ cats make when I’m trying to sleep, or people asking why I would be interested in the “Nazi language”. These two things actually comprise the two main reasons as to why German is commonly perceived as a “harsh” language: both its linguistic and its historical background.
Charlie Chaplin’s parody of Nazism in The Great Dictator plays heavily on perceptions of German as a harsh language. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
So what exactly makes a language “harsh”? There is no singular defining element, but the languages that English natives tend to view as harsh, including German, Dutch, and Russian, incorporate many noises made at the back of the throat –– these are called uvular fricatives. German uses a lot of harsh consonants in addition to this, such as v, f, and s, as well as its rolled r and infamous ch. Sounds are, of course, the building blocks of any language, and when hearing an unfamiliar language, the brain automatically focuses on the sounds that are most different from those of its own language. Thus, from an English understanding of sound, German is simply a conglomeration of these sounds, which are, linguistically speaking, markedly harsher than those of our own language.
Two distinct linguistic features of German further contribute towards this perception of harshness. The first is the Auslautverhärtung, which translates literally as “hardening of the final sound”. In practice, this means that even without noticing, many Germans will change a “b” sound at the end of a word to a “p”, a “d” to a “k”, or a “g” to a “k”. Thus the word “Lieb”, despite being spelled as though it ends with a soft sound, is usually pronounced in a way more akin to “leap”, which is self-evidently harsher. The second is the stimmerloser glottaler Plosiv (or glottal stop). This is the sound represented by the apostrophe in “Bri’ish” or “bu’er”, and it features in practically every German word that begins with a vowel, creating an almost imperceptible dissonance (to the English speaker’s ear).
It seems that these linguistic elements alone already contributed to a marked dislike of the sound of German among English speakers –– Charles V allegedly said that he spoke German only to his horses, and Mark Twain wrote a great deal about how tiresome he found learning the language (including recounting a dream in which “all bad foreigners went to German Heaven. Couldn’t talk and wished they had gone to the other place”). However, the events of the first half of the twentieth century irrevocably altered the global perception of Germany, German culture, and unavoidably, the German language.
The first exposure that many Brits have to German is in the context of Nazi Germany. Most of us watched videos of Hitler shouting in the Burgtheater German of the Nazi era, and some, never getting to know the language beyond that, still subconsciously associate the language with war, anger, and shouting. This is compounded by the representation of Germans in many twentieth-century films; for example, the caricature of the German enemy screaming Achtung is ubiquitous in WWII films. Any language, of course, sounds harsh when someone is using it to shout military commands, but when you do not hear it outside of this context, the brain naturally extrapolates this small snippet of experience to the rest of the language. What those who do not speak German often overlook is that these words are deliberately chosen, and then overenunciated, in order to create the desired stereotype of the angry German. This is not the same language that you will hear in a small village in Bavaria, for example, nor is it the German of Berlin suburbs.
French actually incorporates many of the same linguistic features as German (the verb rester, for example, begins with the same uvular fricative that is so disliked in German), but the majority of native English speakers are unlikely to find French ugly. In part, this is due to the fact that the historical relationship between France and England has been, generally speaking, much more friendly than that between Germany and England –– no one wants to tell their political allies their language sounds like a box being ripped open. Had the events of the twentieth century been different, therefore, it is possible that we as English speakers would take an entirely different view of the German language.
