That is a wonderful video. The gibberish she speaks in Each language sounds pretty convincing, although I noticed my relationship with each language affected how it sounded a lot.
French and Spanish: I've heard them around but never spoken them. She sounded perfect.
Swedish: I used to be able to speak it but have forgotten. She sounded even more convincing than in French.
Japanese: I speak it now but not natively. She sounded pretty rough and not all that Japanese to me.
English: My native language. My brain tried so hard to make sense of it and pulled out snippets of words but there was no grammar there.
As a Norwegian, who grew up with a plethora region specific accents in my own country, then moved to Australia, I love this.
In her next video, she completely nailed the (female version of the) Australian English. Really had to laugh out loud at how she captured that essence. Genius.
Edit: It's certainly not the only one, all Australian females don't sound like this; it's just that she got this particular version of the Australian ones so right. I'm actually somewhat confused as to how to place it; back home you'd have the geographical regions and that's it. So I wonder if this Australian one is more of a "sociolect". If anyone has any info / pointers I'd love to learn more.
You're likely referring to the "bogan" accent, and yes, it's absolutely a sociolect: bogans are the Australian equivalent to US rednecks, except that bogans are essentially a poor suburban phenomenon.
> So I wonder if this Australian one is more of a "sociolect". If anyone has any info / pointers I'd love to learn more.
Similar maybe to the "valley girl" American accent. Once perhaps a California only thing, now something you hear from teenage girls/women in their 20s all around the US (probably due to Hollywood, in part).
Finnish: (my first, heritage language) Had the right set of phonemes and the right pace of speech, but no discernible meaning. It confounded me and would have irritated me had it been longer.
English: (my second, dominant language) See above.
And for languages with which I only have a passing familiarity...
Swedish, Estonian, French: Pretty convincing.
Portuguese: A bit off the mark. Sounded almost like Italian.
Japanese: Only sort-of convincing.
Spanish (Castilian): Her stress placement seemed a little off but most of the vowels were good. Sort of an Americanized version.
I'm Swedish and it is very convincing, some sentences are pretty much all real words (I might be finding words where she didn't actually say them though) but the meaning is not there.
For fun I tried to transcribe it.
----
Asså de e ju man svarta man handlar jua
Filen man råd ostaglig kämpare
Me de sju mat trämpar me alla pluva som fan
Dessa fjortare plådar oss mot en botande mas hemma
I think Saara (her real name is Saara Forsberg) is actually quite fluent in Swedish, and Finnish is her mother tongue. The video is intentionally gibberish. It's indeed a talent that she can sound so real without saying anything that makes any sense at all.
In a somewhat related sort of humour, as a Swedish-speaker you might enjoy this piece of gibberish:
(It's the genuine Soviet anthem in Russian, with Swedish subtitles that will sound similar when you sing them out, and the hallucinatory Swedish sentences are then demonstrated in video. I just love it, though I don't know the guy who did this.)
> English: My native language. My brain tried so hard to make sense of it and pulled out snippets of words but there was no grammar there.
As an English speaker with a bit of German, that's how Dutch sounds to me: it sounds like English, only wrong somehow. I feel that if I just focused a bit harder, or they'd enunciate more clearly, I'd understand it.
She goes for Spain Spanish, you can notice this because most S sound like Z and she says something like "pues" (which is commonly used in spain). The last sentence she says something like "a huevo cabron" with spain accent but the expression itself is very mexican.
There's a fantastic English-sounding song by an italian singer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano. It hurts my brain when I try to pick out meaning from the phenomes.
The Sims 2 Maxis audio director [0] went all-in on beefing up Simlish to freakishly mirror English--the same phonemes, only scrambled up into gibberish. When sang with convincing emotion and inflection, it sounds quite incredible and has you nodding along without even realizing the lyrics are completely fabricated.
The Humble Brothers produced most of the Simlish tracks in the mid 00s and have an album of their impressive songs available on iTunes. "Upside" is a fine example.[1]
I love this song. I had always wondered what (American) English sounds like to people who don't understand it. As a native speaker I thought I couldn't know, but when I heard this song I did!
She just crammed the Semitic sounds in a few made up words sparkled by some real Arabic words and that's it but she should have been making more effort in imitating the rhythm and intonation (prosody) [1] to fool the native Arabic speaker ears that what she speaks was actually Arabic.
"What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners" https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw