Have you ever listened to a language you don’t know and thought you recognized a word—only to realize later that you were completely mistaken? Our ears play tricks on us.

A while ago, I ran a small experiment with my German students. I played them two short sentences in Czech, my native language, and asked them to transcribe what they heard. The results were fascinating.

For example, about 90% of the forty students wrote down the Czech word malí [maliː] ‘small’ as mani [maniː]. To me, this seems puzzling—there is no n in the word! But for my students, the Czech l-sound somehow resembled the German n-sound. None of the Czech speakers I consulted ever had this impression.

This little classroom experiment shows something important: we don’t all hear sounds the same way. Our ears—or better said, our brains—are tuned by the language(s) we grow up with.

Why do we hear differently?

Image 1: Oscillogram and spectrogram of the Italian words papa ‘Pope’ and pappa ‘porridge’

Long before we speak, we are already great language users. Research shows that newborn babies can already distinguish speech sounds from noises. Even more surprisingly, they are able to recognize the rhythm of their native language from a non-native one before birth.

After birth, infants are surrounded daily by an enormous amount of speech input. Step by step, they build categories for the sounds of their native language. Up until around 8 to 12 months they can distinguish nearly all of the world’s speech sounds, even those that never appear in their environment.

A Japanese baby, for example, can hear the difference between r and l just as well as American or German babies can. But this ability does not last. As children grow, their brains focus on the categories that matter in their own language and ignore the rest—like the difference between r and l. This is why many Japanese adults often find it notoriously difficult to distinguish the two consonants in languages like English. What was once easy for the baby can become very challenging for the adult.

We perceive foreign languages through native filters

Learning the sound system of a language doesn’t stop with vowels and consonants. It also includes rhythm and intonation. And even for individual sounds like a or o, it’s not only about how you articulate them but also how long you hold them. This brings us to segmental quantity, or length. It refers to the use of duration (short vs. long) of vowels or consonants to distinguish lexical meaning. Quantity shows remarkable cross-linguistic variation.

The case of long consonants in Italian

Image 2: Soundproof cabins at the Free University of Berlin (left) and University of Helsinki (right)

What feels natural in one language may not exist in another. Take Italian. It belongs to just 3.3% of the world’s languages that distinguish short from long consonants (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996).

This contrast appears in more than 1,800 Italian words, such as papa /ˈpapa/ ‘Pope’ versus pappa /ˈpapːa/ ‘porridge’ (Image 1). To be understood and to speak well, learners must get long consonants (called geminates) right—although it can be very challenging (e.g., Altmann et al. 2012).

Cross-linguistic differences in learners

In our project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language”, we examine how Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish learners acquire this feature.

The selection of these languages is not random. They all handle consonant length differently. German, for example, has no consonant length but contrasts short and long vowels in stressed syllables (e.g., Stadt [ʃtat] ‘city’ vs. Staat [ʃtaːt] ‘state’). Czech, like German, distinguishes vowel length, but unlike German, it does so in both stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., nosí [ˈnosiː] ‘(s/he) carries’ vs. nosy [ˈnosɪ] ‘noses’). Finnish is the most similar to Italian, since it has both vowel and consonant length (e.g., muta [ˈmutɑ] ‘mud’ vs. mutta [ˈmutːɑ] ‘but’). And finally, Spanish has no length contrasts at all.

This diversity allows us to test how a learner’s native language shapes the way they hear and produce length in Italian.

How good are learners at perceiving length in Italian?

In a laboratory setting (Image 2) and by means of a perception experiment, we tested and compared 20 Czech, 20 Finnish, 20 German, and 20 Spanish learners of Italian.

We used 45 short nonsense words that followed Italian spelling and sound rules but had no meaning. Each word had two versions, differing only in whether a consonant was short or long (e.g., sàpolo vs. sàppolo; milèta vs. millèta).

The words covered different consonants and stress positions and were recorded by a native Italian speaker. In every trial, participants had to answer the question: “Does the audio pair you hear belong to the same or different word?”

What we found

Image 3: Learner accuracy in perceiving Italian consonant length in comparison to native listeners

First language has great impact! Finnish learners, whose native system is closest to Italian, were the most accurate in hearing the difference between short and long consonants.

Czech learners followed, while German and Spanish learners struggled more (Image 3). Other factors also played a role. Learners heard contrasts more easily when the crucial sound appeared in stressed syllables, and some consonants were easier to notice than others.

Proficiency helped too—advanced learners did much better than beginners.

However, it is unexpected that the German group scored lower than the Spanish group—sometimes research simply surprises us!

Many factors could explain this, since every learner has their own story. Things like previous language experience, weekly study time, exposure to Italian, time spent in Italy, Italian friends, motivation, and personal talent can all play a role.

In our case, German learners had spent fewer hours per week learning Italian and had less experience studying or staying in Italy. Immersion—the experience of being surrounded by a language in real-life settings—seems a plausible factor behind their performance.

Why perception matters in language learning?

Why does pappa sometimes turn into papa in the ears of Italian learners? Because we all hear foreign languages through the features we are familiar with.

Our experiment showed that perception is difficult—but it can be improved. The key is to notice what is different and to train your ears. This means: Pronunciation training must start with perception (e.g., Colantoni et al. 2021).

In the end, learning a language is not just about new words—it’s about learning to hear differently.

References

Altmann, H.; Berger, I., & B. Braun (2012). Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic contrasts. Second Language Research 28(4), 387–413.
Colantoni, L., Escudero, P., Marrero-Aguiar, V., & J. Steele (2021). Evidence-based design principles for Spanish pronunciation teaching. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 639889.
Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the DFG-project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language: Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish learners in contrast”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Project number 521229214) and executed at the Free University of Berlin. Project website: https://italiangeminates-project.com/

Diego Marani’s novel New Finnish Grammar (translated by Judith Landry from the Italian original, Nuova Grammatica Finlandese) has won multiple awards and has already been reviewed many times. The (English language) reviews discuss Marani’s fascination with language in both this and his other novels, mentioning his professional background as a translator and Europanto, the “mock” language he created. The novel has even been reviewed in the Australian Journal of Linguistics (Libert, 2014).

As the glowing reviews indicate, while the novel indeed discusses language, its structure, and acquisition, it does so in a poetic and engaging way. However, even more striking for me were the links between language learning and migrant identity. This really is a story about language on the move. As I read about Sampo’s emotionally charged and difficult journey to rediscover his lost language and identity, co-narrated by Friari, who reflects on his own experiences as a migrant, I began to consider it a metaphor for the migrant’s journey of building an identity and sense of belonging in a new place, all while adopting a new language. Sampo’s struggles learning Finnish and trying to find his place in a country he is supposed to come from but of which he has no memory, and his striving for authenticity as a speaker (and thus a member of the society) are beautifully portrayed throughout the novel:

My words betrayed my outsider status: my very voice gave off sounds that did not ring true, like a cracked glass. The language did not flow with ease; I had to construct each word carefully before pronouncing it, laboriously seeking the right amount of breath, the correct pressure of the lips, sounding out my palate with my tongue in search of the only point which could produce the sound I was looking for and then turning it into the right case before actually delivering it up…. It seemed impossible to me that everything should be played out within those fractions of a millimetre, that a segment of muscle, if too tense, should alter a meaning completely, that one puff of air too much, or too little, should be enough to cause me to be mistaken for an Estonian or Ingrian, or indeed break off the thread of meaning entirely.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s famous 1896 painting, The defense of the Sampo (Source: Wikipedia)

Reading the novel also encouraged me to learn a little bit about Finnish history and led me to consider Sampo’s individual journey as representing, or at least being similar to, Finland’s recent history. I realized that the novel involves multiple references to language (and identity) on various levels.

In Finland, Sampo’s language acquisition continues with the assistance of his new friend, Koskela, a somewhat eccentric priest. Koskela helps him learn the language by telling him about Finnish history, sharing his thoughts on geopolitics, and through the Kalevala, a collection of epic poems from Finnish mythology and folklore, which was compiled in the 19^th century after being passed down orally through songs.

The Kalevala constituted an important tool for developing and protecting a Finnish national identity against Swedish and Russian influence, as Karner (1991) argues. It was published at a time when Finland was emerging from 600 years of Swedish rule, which ended with (semi-autonomous) integration into the Russian Empire. Despite such a long period under Swedish rule, the Finnish language had largely survived, with only around 14% of the population speaking Swedish. However, Karner argues, Finland was lacking a clear national identity. The Kalevala came to form a pivotal role in the construction of this national identity in what was otherwise a void of “we are neither Swedish nor Russian”. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot, who collected the folklore from rural Finns throughout the country, and published it in 1835, the epic soon became famous throughout Europe, and regarded as constituting complete and “authentic representations of Finnish history: heroes, customs, and religion” (p. 159).

Therefore, the Kalevala forms an important parallel or analogy in New Finnish Grammar: much like Sampo who has no memory of his past, the Finnish nation relies on reconstructing a set of Finnish folktales to reclaim and reconstruct a past Finnish identity, bypassing the preceding 600 years of Swedish rule. In fact, even Sampo’s name itself comes from the Kalevala. As the priest explains to him, the Sampo was a magical and much-coveted object throughout the mythical stories. However, once again resembling Sampo’s own story, nobody is quite sure what it was.

Poster for the 1959 Russian film “Sampo” based on the Kalevala (Source: imdb)

In both cases, the Finnish language is the crucial conduit to reconstructing identity and a sense of history. Language and emerging identity are interconnected and interdependent in both the individual and national. In Finland’s case, in the 1800s, elite Finns spoke Swedish, and Finnish had been maintained through the peasant communities. The Kalevala’s fame and acceptance as an authentic artefact of Finnish history and culture created a renewed value in the Finnish language. Therefore, acquiring and using Finnish was an essential part of national identity formation (Karner, 1991, 159-160).

Likewise, for Sampo, a crucial step in recreating himself, fulfilling his yearning to uncover his past and thus learn who he is, is to learn Finnish. This is a monumental undertaking that he documents throughout the journals that form the medium through which the novel is presented. As he sits watching the priest Koskela discuss the Kalevala in a Finnish that is much too fast and complex for him to understand, he reflects:

I had grasped the bare bones of it even if much escaped me, above all those strange words, those fantastical objects whose shape the pastor outlined vainly with his hands: I had never seen anything like them. But I had been captivated by seeing the sounds forming themselves in his mouth, to be turned into words, then melt away. When I could not understand them, I listened to them like music, a fascinated witness to their fleeting life. How many words needed to bring a man to life!

Language, and the Finnish language in particular, is therefore a fundamental part of Sampo’s struggle to rediscover himself. Set against the bleak backdrop of World War II Finland, it is far from an easy exercise, and in the end – without revealing too much – not a very successful one either.

Diego Marani’s acclaimed novel is therefore much more than an essay on language learning. He seamlessly threads together different languages and identities as they operate on different scales: the individual migrant language-learning struggle, with that of national discourse creation about language and identity against the background of sweeping geopolitical change. While the novel is full of struggle, these engaging themes and the poignant, near-poetic way the story is told (even in its English translation) make reading New Finnish Grammar both a pleasurable and fulfilling undertaking.

References 

Karner, T. (1991). Ideology and nationalism: the Finnish move to independence, 1809-1918. Ethnic & Racial Studies. Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 152-169.
Marani, D. (2011). New Finnish Grammar (trans. J. Landry). Sawtry, UK: Dedalus Books.
Libert, A.R. (2014). Book review of New Finnish Grammar. Australian Review of Linguistics. Vol. 34. No. 2, pp. 292-293.

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Kifibin’s workplace was a big event centre, which was open to the public only once a week

Let me at once introduce you to the main character of this blog post: Kifibin. He is a Ugandan man in his mid-thirties currently working as a cleaner in Finland. His story includes many characteristics typical of migrant cleaners’ trajectories: he began cleaning work while studying on an international programme in a Finnish university, and he would now like to learn more Finnish and move on in his career, but he is struggling to get the opportunity to do so. His case is also typical because there are many African men in the Finnish cleaning industry who are over-educated for the job they are doing.

Kifibin moved to Finland in 2010 to study on an international Master’s programme in the natural sciences. He had completed his Bachelor’s degree and worked in the water industry in Uganda but then wanted to take his studies further. At that time, there were no tuition fees in Finland but the cost of living was high, so Kifibin tried to find a job and finally got part-time cleaning work.

Since he planned to stay in Finland, Kifibin took two beginner-level language courses (A1 and A2 in the European Framework of Reference) at the university. I was teaching the second of these courses and noticed that Kifibin was the most active student in the group, and he attended every lesson, that is, three times a week. He dreamt of becoming a university teacher and researcher. After finishing his programme, he tried to go on to doctoral studies but did not get funding. Nor did he get any other employment opportunities in his field, so he continued cleaning, working now for two cleaning companies, and meanwhile tried to learn more Finnish in order to get access to Finnish society and, particularly, to the broader labour market.

Kifibin mostly cleaned in big, empty spaces

Cleaning is a so-called entry-level job, where students and newly arrived immigrants get their first chance to work. In Finland, as in many other Western countries, cleaning is the most common job for immigrants. The language barrier is often regarded as the main reason for migrants’ difficulties getting a job. It is doubtful, however, whether migrants working in low-paid low-skilled jobs really do have any opportunities to move on. My PhD tackles this question by exploring the opportunities cleaners have for learning the language of their new country.

Private cleaning companies offer their services to companies and public institutions (like schools and hospitals) and cleaners often work on various sites. Here, the focus is on the workplace where Kifibin worked in the mornings: a large event centre, where a big sporting event is organised every week. It has restaurants, cafés, stables, toilets and locker rooms. I followed Kifibin’s work there for nine days in the spring of 2013, making field notes, recording some of Kifibin’s encounters with other people, and having discussions and interviews with Kifibin and with people we came across during his daily routine.

Kifibin cleaned a cafeteria every morning at 6 am before it opened

I was surprised how alone Kifibin was at work. He was the only cleaner working in the event centre, which was open to the public only once a week. He therefore worked mostly in closed, empty spaces. Cleaners usually work outside opening and office hours, as it is easier to clean empty places. I always had my audio-recorder with me but some days I did not get to record anything: besides greetings, there really was no interaction. No coffee breaks with work mates, no short chats in the corridor, no phone calls.

Once a week, however, Kifibin’s supervisor came to tell him about any extra tasks he had to do or other changes in the cleaning routine, and sometimes a restaurant manager, who was the contact person between the event centre and the cleaning company, exchanged a word or two with Kifibin. However, she mostly spoke English to him. In an interview, she explained why she was not in regular contact with the cleaner:

Actually the cleaning is outsourced and the supervising is outsourced, too, so it should disturb our work as little as possible so to say. So the cleaner should be like very invisible. […] And of course I need to contact their managers too so that the billing patterns and other stuff will be correct.

When the floor is being washed, it is difficult to stay in the same place as the cleaner

The restaurant manager’s words reveal the complexity of privatization and sub-contracting: she had to contact the cleaning company rather than tell the cleaner directly of any changes. Kifibin was not part of the event centre’s work community. At the same time, he was isolated also from his own work community, and did not meet his co-cleaners regularly.

Kifibin had no longer time to take any language courses as he cleaned from 6 am to 2 pm in this workplace and, besides, worked all evening for another cleaning company. That is why he tried to learn Finnish during the workdays, despite his isolation. He had asked his supervisors to use Finnish instead of English with him, and he tried to learn from the instructions they gave. Partly because of our teacher–student relationship, Kifibin asked me a lot of questions about the Finnish language during my fieldwork days. He also tried to read notes and signs in the workplace and he listened to the radio while cleaning:

There are few people around, and I’m always alone so I get to listen to the radio almost every day. So that has also been good for me to learn different phrases or even as well listening, especially listening, and trying to understand different topics when people are talking about different situations.

Kifibin took photos of signs that he tried to use for language learning at his workplace

Kifibin thought he had only limited possibilities to develop his language skills at work; he mostly learned to understand, not so much to produce Finnish. A year after this fieldwork, in 2014, Kifibin took a National Certificate of Language Proficiency test. He passed the intermediate level, which is required for getting Finnish citizenship (equivalent to level B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference). However, he is still stuck in cleaning work.

The precarious state of affairs in the Finnish cleaning industry became evident during the period of fieldwork when the client company cancelled the cleaning contract, after getting a better offer from another cleaning company. That is why Kifibin’s workplace changed when he had been cleaning there for seven months. Because of the fierce price competition in the cleaning industry, cleaners’ working hours have been cut to a minimum. This makes cleaning work both physically demanding and insecure. Cleaners need to be efficient, flexible and able to change their routines whenever their company loses an old contract or wins a new one.

In Finland, those immigrants whose residence permit is dependent on a specific minimum number of working hours often need to stay in cleaning jobs no matter what. For migrants like Kifibin, cleaning might turn out to be a dead-end job rather than a stepping-stone to a better one.

***

This study is part of the research project Finnish as a work language: A sociocognitive approach to work-related language skills of immigrants, funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (University of Jyväskylä, Department of Languages, PI: Minna Suni).

Details about this case study on language learning in cleaning work are available in Strömmer (2016).

***

Strömmer, M. (2016). Affordances and constraints: Second language learning in cleaning work Multilingua DOI: 10.1515/multi-2014-0113

Bilingual Swedish-Finnish monument in Helsinki commenmorating globally beloved children’s author Tove Jansson, a Swedish-speaking Finn (Source: vanderkrogt.net)

50,000 people have signed a petition against mandatory Swedish classes in Finnish schools, triggering a parliamentary debate on the issue.

To assess the likely outcome of this, it’s instructive to consider some details of the sociolinguistic context (both historical and contemporary). Currently, Swedish first-language speakers make up approximately 6% of Finland’s population of five-and-a-half million, whereas the figure for Finnish sits at around 90%. These figures are almost exactly reversed in the Åland Islands (a small autonomous Finnish region located between Sweden and Finland), where Swedish is the only official language.

By Finnish national law, Swedish instruction begins at the latest in the three years of lower secondary school, with a minimum of 228 hours of instruction over those three years. Provision in upper secondary schools varies greatly, and can be as low as 16 hours total. As a result of this variation in demography and education, levels of proficiency acquired in Swedish are very mixed. There is also a good deal of resistance from pupils who become disinterested in Swedish, most notably in those areas where Swedish use is low.

Now consider the historical context. From the Middle Ages until the 19th century, Finland was ruled and governed as a part of Sweden. During this period, especially the later stages, Swedish was the language of the ruling class. In 1809, Finland was conquered by Russia, but still retained Swedish as the language of administration, justice, and higher education.

During the late 19^th and early 20^th century, Finnish gained ground in social and official domains due to growing nationalist sentiment. The first language law providing equal status for Finnish and Swedish was approved in 1902. Finland gained independence in 1917; and its current constitution came into effect in 1922, declaring co-official status for Finnish and Swedish (partly in order to see off Russian). In Finnish society today, Swedish is generally spoken more in the coastal southern, south-western and western regions, as well as in larger cities due to migration.

The petition reflects heated civic debate with passionate arguments on both sides. Ultimately though, it seems likely that the Finnish Parliament will not actually grant the wishes of the petitioners. There are several reasons…

First and most obvious is the co-official status for Finnish and Swedish, enshrined at the highest level in the national constitution. Mandatory Swedish education was not explicitly specified in the constitution, but subsequent laws have formalised that requirement. Whether constitutional amendments were deemed to be necessary, or just repeal of individual laws, decisive consensus would be needed from Finnish MPs – in a relatively diverse multi-party system ill-suited to radical change.

Second, mandatory Swedish in education began with a compromise in the 1970s involving reciprocal mandatory Finnish in Swedish-speaking municipalities – and so any change could affect both languages, which may be unappealing to Finns and seen as a risk to national unity.

Third, Finland is a signatory of the Declaration of Nordic Language Policy which aims to strengthen the teaching of Scandinavian languages. Finnish is not a Scandinavian language, and although Finland is a Nordic country (along with Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden), it is not consistently seen as part of Scandinavia (which tends to refer to just Denmark, Norway and Sweden) and so this could be seen as weakening Nordic ties – one may also speculate about Finnish consequently losing favour in Sweden’s schools, where it is taught in many border and coastal areas.

So, radical change may seem unlikely. Nevertheless, having said all this, it is worth pausing for a moment to assess the weight of opinion in this petition. The Finnish Parliament’s established threshold of 50,000 signatures might seem modest, but that is almost 1% of the Finnish population – the equivalent of requiring around 600,000 signatures in the UK, or around 3 million in the USA. For further perspective on this weight of opinion, the most signed petition on the UK’s official petition site currently has 266,327 signatures – around half the level of support for this Finnish poll by proportion of the population. So this is no fringe movement. Meanwhile, the Association of Finnish Culture and Identity runs periodic surveys showing broad support for removing the mandatory provision of Swedish. Then there’s the conspicuous rise of the nationalist ‘True Finns’ party (a bulwark of the anti-compulsory Swedish campaign), who now hold about a fifth of Parliamentary seats.

The lively critiques of mandatory Swedish range from utilitarian critiques of the usefulness of Swedish globally, all the way through to conspiratorial grumblings about powerful shadowy Swedish-speaking élites skewing Finnish corporate hiring practices. This latter aspect is troubling not least because it is so reminiscent of the sorts of malevolent conspiracies peddled elsewhere throughout history, about minorities seen as secretly pulling invisible strings.

In the end, the petition, the right-wing electoral upsurge, and the heating up of this old debate, could just be a historically familiar insular reaction to economic woes. It could just be a cloud that lifts with economic recovery. Nevertheless, that recovery is not expected imminently: real-terms declines in earnings are projected for years to come in Finland. So, at the very least this debate will lumber on for some time. Add to this the growth of migration to Finland – in particular Russian-speakers, projected to outweigh Swedish-speakers by 2050 – and the debate becomes even more complex and diffuse.

Whichever route Finland eventually chooses, it is unlikely to resolve the debate definitively. Finns are a judicious and cautious people. The trajectory of the debate can be summed up by an old Finnish proverb, which roughly translates as ‘better to go a mile in the wrong direction than take a dangerous shortcut’.

Each time I visit France and have breakfast there, I am reminded of Goethe. In his 1792 essay “Campagne in Frankreich” he offered this spot-on description of the difference between Germans and their neighbors to the West: “White bread and black bread form the shibboleth, the war cry that distinguishes the Germans and the French.”

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word. The tanakh (Sefer Shoftim; Book of Judges 12:5-6) describes it as a military code word in the war of the Gileadites against the Ephraimites. 42,000 Ephraimite refugees were massacred at a ford in the Jordan river because they mispronounced “shibboleth” (which means “ear of corn” and, in this context, also “body of water”) as “sibboleth.” To be historically accurate, despite the spelling sh-b-l-t, the Gileadites pronounced the initial sound as a voiceless dental fricative, like th in English, and the Ephramaites replaced it with an s-sound.

Fatal mispronunciations have been reported in other wars, too. During the War of the Sicilian Vespers, 2,000 French occupiers were killed in Palermo in 1281. They were identified because they couldn’t pronounce the c-sound ceci (“chick-peas”) and chichi (“beans”) in the Italian way.

During World War II, Dutch resistance fighters used the pronunciation of the city of Scheveningen to distinguish between friend and foe. Germans failed to pronounce the city name as s-cheveningen and used an intial sh instead. And during the Finnish-Soviet Winter War of 1939/40, the Finnish code word was Karjala (“Karelia”), which Russian soldiers would mispronounce as “Karelija.”

Marion Tauschwitz reports a particularly gruesome shibboleth in her biography of Hilde Domin. Like many other German-Jewish refugees, the poet Hilde Domin found refuge in the Dominican Republic in 1940. The dictator Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic at the time, thought that European-Jewish refugees provided him with an opportunity to “whiten” his people a bit. While he welcomed European immigrants, he used drastic means to keep Haitian immigrants out. The Dominican Republic shares borders with French-speaking Haiti and Haitians have always tried to move to the more prosperous Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, Trujillo considered them as too dark-skinned in contrast to the more lightly-skinned population of the Dominican Republic, and so the stage was set for the Parsley Massacre. In 1937, 20,000 Haitians residing in border areas were massacred if they failed to pronounce the Spanish word for “parsley”, perejil, with a rolled r. The typical French substitution of l instead of r made them easy targets.

On the positive side, there are harmless shibboleths, too. Non-native speakers of German rarely manage to pronounce Streichholzschächtelchen (“match box”) correctly and those who can’t do the Swiss German Chuchichäschtli (“kitchen cabinet”) are easily identified as German Germans. Northern Germans in Bavaria are stuck when it comes to Oachkatzlschwoaf (“squirrel tail”) and Bavarians falter at the Low German equivalent, Eekkattensteert. Finally, Non-Jews who want to wish their Jewish friends “Happy Hanukkah” should make sure to stress the first syllable. Stressing the second syllable might lead to the conclusion that the well-wisher only has a superficial knowledge of Judaism.

Christoph Gutknecht is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Hamburg University and the author of numerous popular books about language in German.