V is for V
When I speak English I have a very strange accent. A mixture of American and British English depending on the words spoken and the people I talk to.
When I moved to France and came back to the USA to visit a year later, everyone said that I had a British accent, I really don’t think that I did, it was just different than what I had before leaving. When I moved to England a few years later most people said that I had an American accent, except for my very French pronunciation of “oops” and “Hermes”.
I very quickly took to the local dialect. Once while working in a restaurant in Paris a client asked me “are you from Newcastle?”
“How can you tell?” I asked, astounded that he could pinpoint my place of study that well.
“Well I studied in Durham and you like a real Geordie! So I figured that you are from Newcastle.”
Generally my pronunciation of things changes quickly and adapts in function of the people around me. If you don’t know where I am from, nor where I have lived so far, you’d probably be a bit lost if you heard me talk. Unless…
Unless you heard me start saying words containing the letter V. Like many Germans, I have a problem when it comes to the letter V. A “vending machine” was something with made my flatmates laugh at university, and well S is always giggling when I mispronounce “Harvard”. Not all words with a V are problematic, but some are more than others, in English and in French.
In the German language the letter V exists, but most of the time it is either pronounced as F or W.
F: Vogel, Vater, vor, viel, von
W: Vase, Violine, Video, Vampir
Violent Valery a violet Vampire volunteers for vaccinated vacationers voting on verified viruses.
During the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z Challenge, my theme is authenticity and eclecticism, which in my book go hand in hand.
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© Solveig Werner 2016. All rights reserved.
Solveig Werner 
I feel like I could have written this post!! I have a posh West London accent mostly, with weird Yorkshire tics, but sometimes my German slips out, especially when speaking French.
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Funny, I thought Germans pronounced w as v. I obviously don’t know everything. I think your ability to speak so many languages is truly a wonderful thing.
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well maybe from the American point of view we pronounce w as v, but for Germans V is either pronounced as a German F or W. In movies the pronunciation of “von” always annoys me, because it should be an f sound…
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Now I will never look at Sound of Music in the same way. I will start calling out the Fon Trapps!
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That’s why I always thought the Germans were having a laugh when they decided on Volksvagen as their popular car!
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great and I ruin it with a typo…!
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no not really 🙂
It would be logic to write it Folkswagen (this typo was corrected…) when I was in primary school there were so many v words that I naturally wrote with f. Fater instead of the correct Vater bugged my whole class, we all made that mistake over and over again…
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Of course in my German classes we simply adored Vater. It was peachy
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Don’t we all have some problem with one letter? I don’t like the letter R in English because the sound is no not French. For the longest time I purposely avoided words with the letter R so it would be easier to pronounce.
See you for the letter W!
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I think so. Apparently the “th” is a big problem for many people, but with time I saw that independent of their origin this can be problematic, even for those who speak nothing but English.
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Reading this I could only think of the Star Trek movie where Chekov tires to say “nuclear vessels” – “nuclear wessals, wessals…” OK, Russian, but same idea 😉
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you are making me laugh! ok maybe I’ll have to record some v words so that everyone can have a good laugh…
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Do it, and make sure you include “Harvard” 😉 Locally it is pronounced Haw-ved…. (I live close to Boston)
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Well, haven’t I had a late night education. I forget about the accent side of things with us all hooking up on the blog. Given my German heritage, I am aware of the V thing but hadn’t considered what your accent must be like. My accent is not strongly Australian as I come from a part of Sydney that speaks proper…LOL I do get asked if I’m from New Zealand.
It is so late. We went to see Jungle Book at the movies tonight and still had to finish my post on Yeats. I need a month of sleep after this challenge is done.
Hope you’re holding up well, Solveig!
xx Rowena
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