Die Schreckliche deutsche Sprache

 I really love the format of blogging because as a literature major I often find myself and my writing bound by things like "the conventions of the language" or "making sense in a concise form." I do not feel the same type of limitations here, and frankly that affords me a lot of piece of mind, because the format opens the door for the random happenings of my life to take on a quasi academic shape. 

The title of this post is "Die Schreckliche Deutsche Sprache" which is the German name/translation of Mark Twain's iconic essay "The Terrible German Language." In this essay Mark Twain pokes around his lifelong journey to learn German and gives a quick American whit to the eccentricities of Deutsch. It is a perfect read for anyone learning German, and upon rereading the essay in the appendix of Twain's book "A Tramp Abroad" — which chronicle's the satirist's 1878 trip through Baden and Switzerland—I inclined to share an irksome (and cultural) experience I have had with the German language: Namely accent/ Akzent.

Last week while swimming in the Austrian Wörthersee, I overheard a family speaking what I thought was Italian. After a bit more conversation I realized they were speaking German, but in the Kärnten dialect local to the region. I barely understood what was being said besides the occasional "genau." It was the same language but I could barely tell.

One of the things numerous German lecturers have told me is that there is no correct way to speak German, but there is a correct way to say each of the letters (subsequently each letter is often spoken in pronouncing a German word). As someone pursuing some type of fluency, it often pains me to hear my fellow Americans speak German with no intent of assuming an accent—often creating something that sounds wrong from afar. In my personal attempts to get the Akzent down I have been asked/ given the following compliments:

*Note following phrases are both paraphrased and often translated*

Amerikaner!

Are you British?

I didn't realize, you sound just like a native German!

I didn't realize, you sound like an Austrian!

Do you live in the South (Bayern)?

Are you Dutch?

Have you been studying in Berlin?

and the most frequent and personally confusing—Are you French.

Beyond what I, and my French friends, think is the absurd notion that I speak German with a French accent, I have learnt that accent means different things to the different people hearing it. When I am in the North, people ask me if I'm from the South, in small villages people ask me if I am from large cities, Austria if I am German, and people pretty much everywhere think I am French. This is without a doubt because my German comes from Geneva, New York, or from Palestinians I met in Heidelberg, or the Schwabian I hear in Tübingen. My German is not German so to many Germans it is just *German from another part of the country*

One of the other Americans in my program at Tübingen once proudly said that she didn't speak English with an accent, only for all of the Europeans in the room to laugh at her. The "American Accent" is is pervasive enough that for most people American English only has Southern, New York, Californian, and maybe Boston if you are from the North East, because in the United States most people adopted English to meet the status quo of the state, whereas in Germany the state was created to meet the existing similarities with the language. This means that in Germany there is a much deeper and diverse set of linguistic differences. It isn't a matter of saying "Cola" "Pop" or "Soda" but can be a different way of saying patterns in speech. For example the upper Saxon dialect changes "ig" endings to "ing" and the Bavarian and Swabian changes "chen" to "le."

The size of these changes can make it hard for people from around this (comparatively) small country to understand one another. That is why on television, in schools, and at University Hochdeutsch (high German) is spoken. This gives a certain uniformity to the speech where people agree to drop regional differences in the public square. The differing cultural practice of a variety of dialects ends up solving itself in with the product of Hochdeutsch. Nonetheless as a foreigner who is trying their best at pronouncing words in Hochdeutsch the trained ear often mistakes me as speaking dialects I don't know exist, or even worse—French.