How To Tell What Country Someone Is From With A Single Word 

The radio program at the end is called “Where Are You From” from linguist Dr. Henry Lee Smith. Also I want to clarify that none of these pronunciations are wrong, they are just regional preferences and habits that can give you information about what language system someone is accustomed to.

you can also tell where someone is from by asking them "where are you from?"

Americans “Say street” “Street” “Ah see. He’s a foreigner”

“Oh! Are you from Greece?” “No, I just have a lisp.”

As a german, never in my entire life have I myself pronounced or heared another german pronounce "street" like "shtreet"

This video is streets ahead!

In my experience, it may not be that Italians who know English will do ‘streetsa’ but instead over emphasize the s at the end as they very carefully cut the word off. They will also roll the r a little

I had a linguistics professor who figured out where my mom was born and grew up, by my speech. Considering I had speech therapy as a child and my grandmother had been born in a different state and moved before meeting my grandfather makes this accomplishment amazing. For those interested, grandma was born in Buffalo, NY. My mom was born and raised in Chicago. Grandpa was not in the picture. I was born and raised in Sacramento, CA.

POV everybody would just say "streets" in perfect english

"oh yeah i know lots of languages" "how do i say streets?" "esshtrayeetssa"

As an Italian I've heard a lot of English words mispronounced but I've never heard someone pronounce streets "streetsa" in my entire life

- can you pronounce "streets"? - da poshol ty nah...

french: "zeuh strit"

German here (🙈 pardon me) I DOUBT that many germans will make a "shtreet" out of this. I'd say they might more likely say it like "stweets" because this whole W-R-V-situation is tricky for lots of german english-speakers.

I’m German and have never heard anyone say SHtreet. However, a common thing at least in school years is to say school not as “skool” but “shool” because, in German, the “sh” sound is written “sch”.

Fun facts: Europeans can speak English without any accent

Italian here. From my experience only in American movies will you find someone who pronounces “streets” like that. It’s much more common that we pronounce it “streez”

Swede here. Most Swedes would try their darndest to pronounce it in as close to an English accent as possible. But what would give us away is possibly the R sound, it's not as flavourful as the Spaniard's but it is close. And the dead give-away is the melody. Swedish is a pitch-accent language, and no word is ever monotone.

As a german I would dissagree. Its not a pronunciation thing, its only a rule in written german. WE HAVE NO ISSUES PRONUONCING "ST"

As a spanish person I confirm this, the english teacher in the school was always saying that is Spain not Espain.

Dutch tend to flatten their vowels, so when someone does that it is a giveaway

"Where are you from?" "I'm from the sstreetss."

Never heard a German saying “Schtreets” if he wanted to say “Streets”. xD

I used to live in Finnmark County of Norway during some of my primary school years. After a while, I could easily point out where in the county someone was from, like Alta, Hammerfest, Karasjok, Kautokeino, Kirkenes, Vadsø and Vardø. Being acute to the differences in local speech patterns is definitely a perishable skill.

No, Germans will not say "Schtreets". We may have a harsh accent, but that's not how you'll know.

As a German I can say that I've never heard someone say shtreet

Ask a New Yorker and they'll pronounce it "'Eyy I'm walkin' 'ere!"

A spanyard that doesn't know english would pronounce every single letter, that means, to e, but the vowels in spanish NEVER change their sound, no matter the context, so they would use the same E that is on "Elephant" Pronouncing "es-tre-ets"

As an espanish, I can confirm we pronounce spiderman [espeederman]

You can find out if they're British if they say: "Schreet" (S-ch-ree-t) (I am British btw)

If you ask a drunk brit, they'll pronounce streets as "bedroom"

Poland: Jezdnie Everyone: Wtf💀

You would never hear an Italian say “streetsA” you think we all speak like super Mario or something 💀

Nobody in Germany would ever say "Shtreets". Greetings from a German.

European here. He managed to get absolutley everything wrong in this short video. Quite an achievement.

As a German: never encountered any German saying Shtreet. It's pronounced like the st we use in basteln, Fasten, Fest, Pest, Rest, Rast etc.

As an Italian, I know a lot of Italians who are bad at English, but never ever in my life have I heard an Italian adding random vocals at the end of a word 😅

No, Russians don't add _y_ anywhere. A "Russian" street sounds as short as "strit" but still as narrow as "street". But the most prominent feature will be the rolled _r:_ "strrit".

"Prononcue streets!" "Ulica." "Oh..."

I had an English professor in Upstate N.Y. nail my county in Monmouth County N.J. as where I grew up and she was correct! She nailed a lot of us in the class.

I'm German and while I do agree with you that in German most St sounds are pronounced sht.. 😅 I and everyone I know is capable of just pronouncing it st like you would in English.

As an Italian I must say that yes, we don't end a word with a consonant, but we have no problem pronouncing words that end with it. We instead would have problems say the "r" since italian "r" is really vibrant. So we would say "strrreet" with a vibrant "r"

Hi *Black* -Kane 😃

Dutch people mostly pronounce a hard T. Or a rolling R depending where they are from in the country. I noticed this quite early in the Dutch English accent too. Anyhow I’d like to hear more of your videos so I’m subscribing, keep up the good work!

And then we have Europeans that can just speak English

Italian here! I never understood this “-a” thing that native english speakers hear when talking with italian speakers untill I found out the [ə] sound. The schwa vowel isn’t present in italian language and it brings us to a lot of problem when trying to reprodure a “correct” pronunciation, mainly because it is basically not even known around here. I think that our pronunciation is closer to “streetsə” more than “streetsa”. That’s why there is plenty of italians comments complaining under this reel 😂

"Anywhere" in Europe. Proceeds to list 5 out of 44 countries.

Swedish would say Streeeets with the e sound more like an "i".

The marked area at the end is the province of Seville in Spain, where I am from. It appearing for no reason has given me also an unreasonable joy, for which I thank you!

As an italian i never heard someone say it like that

Me German: *saying streets* „huh, i dont say streets with sh.“ *saying Straße* „oh there you have it“ 😂

Squirrel is still the most effective way to find out who has English as their second language

Sweden: Striiiit where the i sounds like a bee humming

Bro, most of us learn enough English in school not to sound like cartoon villains...

I'm Italian, nobody would add an A to streets.

For England, ask them how to pronounce bottle of water

That explains why all my Hispanic coworkers call Steven "Esteven".

No German would ever say shtreets😂😂

I love this channel, but I can assure that any Italian would say "Streetsa", more probably an Italian who doesn't know English will likely say "Strèèts"

Im Dutch, and from what I can tell if I say “street” it doesn’t sound too different from how Americans or English people would say it (:

"Can you say streets?" "Shtreets" "You're German." "Wait wha-" "Did i stutter?"

The italian one is taken straight of some italian cartoon parody because we actually never do that 😂

As a russian, no, we don't add a Y glide. You got it all wrong. The only people who add a Y glide are those who try to impersonate a russian accent but don't know what they're actually doing. The word streets said by a russian would have a hard, pronounced R, and also all the consonants would have slightly more weight, as if you were purposely trying to make sure you pronounce every letter. When i switch into english, i always purposely make my consonants more light and flighty to compensate for the accent.

Italian linguist here, get ready for my 2 cents. Not all consonants are the same, there are stop consonants (t p k d b g), fricative consonants (f s sh v), nasal consonants (m n) and a few more groups. A group called sonorants (m n r l) and the fricative s have a long tradition in ancient indo-european languages such as Geek, Latin and Sankrit for being able to find place at the end of words, where otherwise only vowels are allowed. For the same reason the Italian language doesn't have problems in using them in final position (i.e. autobus, bar, juventus, inter, we can even trim "fiore" to "fior", "pane" to "pan", "miele" to "miel" in certain contexts). The same principle doens't apply to all the other consonants, where, even if we don't realize, a final schwa sound appears. So if "streets" would be pronounced quite close to the English standard, "street" would be something like /strit:ə/. I'm obviously talking about people who are not highly proficient in English so don't get offended, my point is that the stereotype of the Italian guy speaking English like Mario is not fully made up, they just hear clearly what we can't (final short schwas after stop and fricative consonants).

Never heard that "y-glide" in Russians saying "little streets". Where did you hear that? Examples? Whereas much more characteristic feature would be "Russian r" sound which simply doesn't exist in English. As to "y glide" - I mostly (or only) hear that when a Russian speaker is mocking an accent of a Western (non-Russian) speaker speaking Russian. Also, it's a way to show in a movie that the person is speaking in not his native language.

I'm an English teacher working with Russians. Never in my life have I heard anyone say lyettle street. They'd rather roll the Rrrrrrrr sound or in case of the word "little" they'd move the i sound to the front and make the l sound really soft

No, as an italian we don't put vocals randomly at the end of words. Maybe we wold add more emphasis on the r 🇮🇹

Only if they never lived in an English speaking country! After few years of speaking only English, the native pronunciation would definitely banished, well, at least to a minimum of 85%...

Russian here. My pronunciation is closer to Greek "Streeetss"

Im italian and i can confirm We never fucking say streetsa

My man, most Europeans will fluently pronounce the word “streets” as if English was their mother tongue. Your examples are seen in stereotypes from movies, but rarely in real life. There are other words that are far more difficult to pronounce with native fluency.

It's true!! My client pronounced SHEEDULE instead of SCHEDULE. For a short period of time I questioned my entire life if I misunderstood how to properly pronounced the word. 😂

Russian speaking: We don’t add “y”. Consonants in our language become soft before most vowels, so it sounds a little bit different. General reason why foreigners struggle with russian vowels is because our vowels are pretty different (but rather simple) from other languages

Actually, in Italy most of the people cannot pronunce englush world correctly, but no one has ever said "Streetsa". It's real the fact that we end every world without a consonant, but we do not have problems saying "Streets"

No idea which Buzzfeed article you skimmed through while researching for this short, but no German has ever said shtreet.

The Russian one is just incorrect. That's how English-speaking people see it, and it sounds weird when they emulate it. Most consonants in Russian have two variants: a soft sound and a hard sound. When followed by one of the softening vowels е, ё, и, ю, я or the soft sign (ь) the consonant sound becomes the soft sound. And there's only one way to pronounce the letter И (the ee sound). So it would be more like Leetle Street (with a Russian R of course) That's the problem English-speaking people face when trying to do an Russian accent. The consonants remain "hard", but they insert the y sound where it doesn't belong, and it sounds even more wrong. There's no y in Blyat. It's Bl'at' (the apostrophe indicates a soft consonant)

As soon as he mentioned italian, I was like, its gonna end in a vowel

I usually just listen to the answer I get when I ask “where are you from?”

not sure if you didnt know before but.... We DO learn english in Germany and if you ask us to pronounce "Street" we usually pronounce it as it is supposed to. And im pretty sure that also applies to other european countries.

Nordic giveaway, the triple vowel sound for double vowels, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic has that

A good tell for a Dutchman saying streets would be the way they say 'r'. Like a really hard and rolling r sound.

The Finnish accent is pretty funny! We may have difficulty with 3 consinants right at the start, we only have one S-sound and one R-sound (the one that is not sh or zz like "sea" and I think it's called the rhotic R? Voiced at the front of the mouth) and we may pronounce soft consonants hard (b->p, d->t, g->k). Also the sounds in the word "judge" don't exist in Finnish. It might become something like 'yuts'. The th-sound WILL be pronounced as a T and an H. It sounds quite a bit like how people in West-Ireland say it! Most importantly - we tend to voice/pronounce EVERY letter of a word as it's written. We don't have silent letters and each letter is always pronounced exactly the same in all words. By searching "rally english/rallienglanti" you'll find great examples. Although I like the word "tankero" for our broken english better.

Me, german watching the short Two seconds in: "is that fucking lübeck?"

For dutch people, we pronounce streets exact like english because in dutch, 1 street is called a 'straat' (but multiple streets are called 'straten'). And the end of the world, words that end with 'ts' we also can pronounce very well

The german version doesn't work in the north where they pronounce words that have a schp or scht sound in standard pronunciation as sp or st. Low german is also linguistically more related to english than high german [is]. [edit for clarification to avoid ambiguity ]

Nah bro, cut the stereotypes, Italians don't come out from a hollywood movie

As a german I don’t know anyone nor have ever heard someone say „shtreets“. It would usually be the way we pronounce the „r“ that you could set it apart. It would make sense for us to accidentally say „shtreets“ though, as the „st“ combination does sound like „sht“ in some words in german.

I am Italian, I have Spanish, German and Greek friends and I can assure you that I NEVER heard the word "streets" pronounced in any of those ways. Just because Italian words usually end with a vocal it desn't mean that we are not able to learn and pronounce other languages words the way they are supposed to. P.S: I have a university degree in Foreign Languages and I never came across any published studies that describe those kinds of pronunciation phenomena...

Just as most german-speakers in the comments here, I NEVER heard anyone saying SHTreet, or SCHTreet. However, in if speaking german, then yes, we have a sh/sch sound. The german translation for Street would be Straße. Also, to clear this up: "sch" is the german version of "sh", but pretty much everyone learning english knows the difference between german and english "st"

A big giveaway for alot of them are the /r/ sounds. [ɾ] for russian, italian, spanish in word onset consonant clusters, [r] for Dutch, and [ʀ] for German and French. The English approximant [ɹ] is actually rather difficult

I'd say as a finnish speaker there's three or four signs. 1. A rolling R 2. Hard consonants 3. A monotone tone (emphasis always at the start of the word) 4. The word is said exactly how it is written, with no extra sounds

As a dutch person, there are some giveaways, but they are mostly noticable in tone. Dutch people often talk very flat, so they can sound a bit monotone. They also pronounce the "R' pretty hard.

german here, never even thought about adding an h, nor heared someone else do it. maybe it's a regional thing.

Im swedish and i think that the give away for being swedish for the word "streets", if you have a thich accent, would be that the ee would sound like i, so stríts

As an Italian i never heard someone say "Streetsa", except it sounds like "Strizza", which translates to "Squeeze" lol Edit: danggg tysm for the likes y'all, didnt expect it but appreciate it, same for the replies ^^

As a guy who lives in germany for over 25 years i ve never heard anyone saying '''schtreets'' in english.

“Can you say this word?” Denmark person: “yeah sure” “Strëëts”

As an Italian, I can say that we don't end English words with A.

A lot of native English speakers also pronounce it "shtreet" but for an entirely different reason.

In Swedish we say thing Swedish like we talk “svenska” and when we talk other languages we still sound Swedish so ask a Swedish person to say a sentence and it will sound Swedish 😊