Estuary German
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’re blue | a? b??t nu? and?w??, ða? blu? |
| And I wore ’em just the other day | ?n ? w?r?m d??st ð? ?ð? da? |
| Love, you know I’ll fight for you | l?v, ju? n?? a?l fa?t f? ju? |
| I left on the porch light for you | a? l?ft ?n d? p??t? la?t f? ju? |
| Whether you are sweet or cruel | w?ð? ju? a? swi?t ?? k?u?(l) |
| I’m gonna love you either way | a?m ??n? l?v ju? i?ð? we? |
| Love, oh, love, I gotta tell you how I feel about you | l?v ?? l?v a? ??t? t?l ju? ha? a? fi?l ?baut ju? |
| ‘Cause I, oh, I can’t go a minute without your love | k?z a? ø? ai kan ??? ? m?n?t wiða?t ju? l?v |
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), but that’s a misunderstanding.
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?].
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’.
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.
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.
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.
Ja det lyder unægteligt sjovt, når hun synger; men det virkede da i grnadprixet 😉
Tak for analysen af hendes udtale.
And I have to say as a translator, why oh why do these people never run their texts past an English native speaker – this song is total foreign nonsense!
Perhaps most people don’t know where to find a native speaker to check their texts? Of course they could go to a translation agency, but that’d cost an arm and a leg. Perhaps one should create a service on the internet that allows you to upload a short text and prepay a fixed fee, and you get a corrected version back within a few days.