The German term Handy is a neat and singular creation, referring to the ‘mobile phone’ (British English) or ‘cell phone’ (American English), in itself a unique and most useful invention – handy, indeed! What is even more remarkable is the pronunciation of this term: /hεndi:/. While the second vowel mirrors the pronunciation of word-final ‘i’ sounds in German (cf. Gabi, Salami, Müsli), the ‘a’ does not. Instead, it appears to reflect a socially generalized view of what a short ‘a’ in English is supposed to sound like. And this is not the front, near-open ‘ash’ vowel [æ], the ‘standard lexical set TRAP’, as defined by Wells (Reference Wells1982: 129), but rather a cardinal [ε], the ‘standard lexical set DRESS’ (128), as found in German in other English borrowings: Jetlag or Jet-Lag /jεtlεg/, Gag /gεg/, relaxen /relεksn/, scannen /skεnǝn/, etc.

The same phenomenon can also be found with a very recent import into German, that of the so-called ‘smartphone’ application or ‘app’ for short. The word in German is App, pronounced /εp/. The fact that this word does not borrow the current English pronunciation, when its referent is so much a feature of the modern world of telecommunication, not a German coinage, is all the more extraordinary.

This is equally true of the terms Laptop, pronounced /lεptɒp/, and Tablet, pronounced /tεblǝt/, the common usage of which reflects their use in everyday life as successors to the desktop computer. Similarly, when referring to the social media site Twitter, German speakers will regularly refer to the Hashtag feature as /hεʃtεg/.

Such a marked pronunciation is not restricted to isolated neologisms or loan words moreover – although the fact that so-called ‘Fremdwörter’ or foreign imports are rendered in this way is a salient indication of how German speakers of English regard English pronunciation. The practice also extends to continuous speech.

Thus, one might imagine a sentence: He then lets Ben mend them when he gets back. Most Germans reading such a statement out loud would pronounce every vowel except for the [i:] in he the same way, namely as [ε]. To the native English listener, this would sound like: He then lets Ben mend them when he gets Beck (as if repair were contingent on enlisting the assistance of an individual called Beck). This pronunciation is not the result of some process of assimilation; rather, it is due to the fact that most Germans on seeing ‘a’ in a sentence will almost invariably read it as a short ‘e’.

At the risk of becoming anecdotal, not long ago, on hearing a German refer to the person /εn smɩθ/, the author of this paper mistook the name to be ‘N. Smith’, whereas the speaker meant ‘Anne Smith’. The marked pronunciation caused confusion on both sides: the listener had clearly mistaken the identity of the individual mentioned, while the speaker, tellingly, was at a loss to understand what they could possibly have said wrong, more so since the speaker was a qualified speech trainer, albeit in their native tongue. Equally, the author is regularly misunderstood by Germans when asked about his origins and he states that he hails from the /mantʃestǝ/ region, the response being, once the interlocutor is enlightened: ‘Ach so: Menchester!’

Where might such an anomaly come from? Why should the apparent German belief about what constitutes acceptable English pronunciation be so far removed from current usage? There is, arguably, no question of first language (L1) interference, since the short ‘a’ is a common enough vowel in German, found in many basic words such as Katze (cat), Mann (man) and, significantly, in the case of the first technological example quoted here, Hand (hand) and, in the case of the second, Apfel (apple). And such is its frequency, especially when English itself is spoken by native German speakers, that its intrusion is striking.

In the light of such evidence, this paper proposes that German pronunciation of this vowel sound reproduces British English usage from a period when the short ‘a’ sound was articulated much higher in the mouth and, thus, was closer to current German pronunciation. This pronunciation today sounds more like a mispronunciation in view of the general lowering that has occurred as contemporary pronunciation has moved to cardinal [a].

Archived recordings of newsreel footage from before and after World War Two lend some weight to this view (cf. the pronunciation of ‘put back the clock’ in ‘An Evening's Diversion: An Elizabethan Evening’ from November 1953),Footnote ² especially when they are compared with the pronunciation of more contemporary news reports (cf. ‘gored in the back’ from 2010),Footnote ³ where short ‘a’ is much opener. And one need only look at a popular film from those earlier times to hear the vowel almost replicated – those of Powell and Pressburger being a case in point. Barely four minutes into their acclaimed film from 1944, ‘A Canterbury Tale’, for instance, the narrator can be heard in the prologue referring to ‘Dan Chaucer’ as /dεn tʃɔ:sǝ/, stating that the ‘land is under plough,’ with the vowel of the first word approximating more to [ε] than to [a], or indeed [ae], and that ‘down in the valley runs our road of steel,’ the scene depicting a /vεlɪ/ prior to the arrival of a steam train.Footnote ⁴ British character actors of the 1950s, such as Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell, Richard Wattis and Alastair Sim,Footnote ⁵ for the most part speak with a similar /ε/ approximation, as can be distinctly heard in the Frank Lauder film of 1950 ‘The Happiest Days of Your Life’. Likewise, children's TV programmes of the 50s such as ‘Watch With Mother’, a BBC series comprising five different programmes each broadcast on a different day from Monday to Friday, feature speakers who all use a closer ‘a’ than today. In one such programme, ‘Bill and Ben’, this close ‘a’ can be heard both in the theme tune and the introduction to each episode (i.e. not only the ‘and’ in ‘Bill and Ben’ but also ‘man’ and ‘have’ in the description ‘a place where the man who worked in the garden left his things while he went into the house to have his dinner,’ as heard in the episode first aired on January 22, 1953.)Footnote ⁶ And in another, ‘Andy Pandy’, the narrator's pronunciation of the ‘a’ in the eponymous character's name again sounds to an untrained listener's ear – which would include a non-native speaker's ear – nearer to an /ε/ than an /æ/.Footnote ⁷ While German speakers of English may not have been exposed to such films and TV programmes, there can be little doubt that the pronunciation found in them is not only indicative of British usage of the period but would also have a normative value for non-native speakers to subscribe to, as the reference to BBC English below seeks to demonstrate.

A second proposal of this paper is that persistent usage over time has fixed this articulation in the popular German consciousness to the extent that whenever a short ‘a’ occurs in English it is generally read and uttered as /ε/. Just how long a time span is involved cannot be determined with any degree of certainty. However, given the documented change referred to, one would expect the period to be significant, say, dating back to well before the early post-war years. Certainly, if current frequency and extent of use is anything to go by, the phenomenon is no ‘overnight event’ that has recently manifested itself and is likely to disappear before long. The pronunciations of coinages such as ‘Handy’ do not emerge suddenly for no good linguistic reason.

It might conceivably be argued that German /ε/ merely resembles other current varieties of English in their pronunciation of a short ‘a’, notably London Cockney, Birmingham ‘Brummie’ or New Zealand English (O'Connor, Reference O'Connor1973: 157), and there is no denying that recent detailed analyses of varieties of English appear to substantiate this resemblance.Footnote ⁸ It could even be claimed that German is influenced by American English (or at least specific varieties thereof), American English being significant due to its global reach. The similarity with South African English, too, cannot be ignored; anyone who remembers the system of apartheid in the latter country will recall the constant governmental references to its /blεk/ population. However, this misses the point that ‘German English’, as it currently reveals itself in the speech patterns of the vast majority of German speakers of English, does not adopt or, indeed, seek to emulate all the other discrete sounds of these different phonologies.

It is clear that, where British English is concerned, the model aspired to is so-called ‘received pronunciation’ (RP), which, according to Leech and Svartvik (Reference Leech and Svartvik1994: 27), ‘is commonly used as a standardized accent for the learning of British English pronunciation’. Confirming its normative status, Roach (Reference Roach2004: 239) states that RP is ‘the accent that has been used as the standard in phoneticians’ description of the pronunciation of British English for centuries.’ Similarly, Crystal (Reference Crystal2010: 456) describes RP as the ‘regionally neutral, prestige accent of British English,’ referring to it as ‘the one most often cited as a norm for the description of British English, or in teaching that dialect to foreigners.’ (Crystal, Reference Crystal1985: 257) Likewise, Kortmann and Upton in their introduction to A Handbook of Varieties of English (Schneider et al, Reference Schneider, Burridge, Kortmann, Mesthrie and Upton2004) state that ‘Received Pronunciation (RP) is […] a supra-regional accent model frequently used in the teaching of English worldwide and for purposes of wide communication.’ (25–26) It is from this traditionally normative phonology that German English borrows by and large.

RP is also referred to as BBC English or the Queen's English. However, since the BBC no longer shrinks from using regional speakers to deliver its news programmes and documentary broadcasts and, furthermore, since the ‘de facto standard’ (Wells, Reference Wells1982: 104) has undergone ‘observable changes’ (Roach, Reference Roach2004: 240), contemporary BBC English has clearly become something other than it once was. Certainly, the type of accent found in children's programmes of the 1950s, for instance, is barely in evidence today. Even current BBC newsreaders whose accent still reflects a more traditional, RP-based pronunciation – a notable example being Sophie Raworth – now use a lower and more open ‘a’ sound.Footnote ⁹ Interestingly, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000) defines RP as the ‘pronunciation of British English, originally based on the speech of the upper class of southeastern England and characteristic of the English spoken at the public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Until recently it was the standard form of English used in British broadcasting.’ BBC English, therefore, has moved on.

So, too, it would appear, have many speakers of English who have received a privileged education. To find another contemporary example, one need look no further than to senior members of the recent British coalition government:Footnote ¹⁰ Prime Minister David Cameron, former Deputy PM Nick Clegg and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne all pronounce the short ‘a’ as a cardinal [a], and all three were educated at prominent public schools (Eton College, Westminster School and St. Paul's School respectively). Listen to Chancellor Osborne say ‘back from the brink of bankruptcy’ or ‘every taxpayer’ in his statement to parliament on 26 June 2013 regarding the spending review, and the point is undeniable.Footnote ¹¹

Even the Queen's English has changed insofar as Queen Elizabeth II has modified her own pronunciation over time, as her last Christmas broadcast of 2014 compared to her first one of 1957 shows: her vowels sound more open, particularly her ‘a's.Footnote ¹² Insofar as her accent continues to express the accent of the British privileged classes, however, we may describe it as a ‘marked’ form of RP, whereby ‘marked’ is understood to mean a specific subset, i.e. a less common form, of RP.Footnote ¹³ Since this marked form usually, if not always now in the Queen of England's case,Footnote ¹⁴ makes little distinction between TRAP and DRESS, i.e. /æ/ and /ε/Footnote ¹⁵ – whereby there is arguably a systemic difference compared to RP, with both man and men being pronounced the same in the marked form – it would appear that this is the type of English that is reflected in modern German terms such as ‘Handy’. And it is towards this currently ‘marked RP’, the type of socially elevated accent associated with a high level of prestige – the RP of the past – that German English tends and which is distinct today only inasmuch as it out of step with current usage.

Lest there be any doubt that contemporary English pronunciation does indeed differ from this marked form, Barber, Beal and Shaw (Reference Barber, Beal and Shaw2009) in their recent work describing the English language corroborate the evidence presented in this paper: ‘More recent changes include […] the lowering of /e/ and /æ/ to /ε/ and /a/.’ (273) Moreover, Cruttenden (Reference Cruttenden2014) has actually ‘dropped the name RP’ (xvii) in favour of the term ‘General British or GB’ (xvii) and made a ‘long overdue’ transcriptional alteration (xvii) to the representation of the short ‘a’ by replacing the ash vowel phoneme /æ/ with primary cardinal vowel /a/, the reason being: ‘The symbol /æ/ has always been an oddity […]: nowhere else is there a separate symbol for a value intermediate between two Cardinal Vowels […]. Moreover the value of this vowel in current GB is much closer to Cardinal [a] than it was fifty years ago.’ (xvii) In line with this position, recent pronouncing dictionaries such as the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (Upton et al.: Reference Upton, Kretzschmar and Konopka2003) and the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (Olaussen & Sangster: Reference Olaussen and Sangster2006) also employ /a/ in place of /æ/, as has the Oxford English Dictionary since 2000, thereby providing a more accurate representation of current pronunciation.

A third contention of this paper regarding the German anomaly is that the codified character of German pronunciation helps to perpetuate this state of affairs, whereby German speakers of English transfer to the language the same sociolinguistic principles that operate in their own. Thus, they attach the status of a ‘Hochsprache’ or standard language pronunciation to RP or, in this case, its marked approximation. Durrell (Reference Durrell and Popp1995) points out the extent to which this ‘sociolinguistic interference’ is prevalent in Germany, claiming in no uncertain terms how Germans will ascribe to the ‘standard English’ learnt in schools a similar status within the English speech community that High German has for them.Footnote ¹⁶ He further emphasises that, rather than being an accepted ‘national standard of pronunciation’ (überregionale Aussprachenorm), RP is a sociolect, defined on social rather than regional grounds, the elevation of which is quite inconceivable to native English speakers generally.Footnote ¹⁷ This view is supported by Barbour (Reference Barbour, Eichinger and Kallmeyer2005), who likewise denies RP the status of a standard within Britain and a defining role within the state education system, although he concedes that the accent of ‘standard speakers’ (Standardsprecher) is often influenced by RP.Footnote ¹⁸

This latter observation may go some way to explain why RP remains important as a model for non-native speakers, beyond the fact that it is regularly used in foreign language (FL) teaching as the model to be emulated. Equally, the influence that a taught standard is likely to exert on the learner should not be underestimated. As Lodge states, ‘A standard language is a set of ideas about what constitutes the best form of a language, the form which everyone ought to imitate.’ (Lodge, Reference Lodge, Bauer and Trudgill1998: 29) Hence, any model held up over time as the ideal form to follow can be expected to remain persuasive for successive generations of learners.

This focus on the practices of education leads us to the fourth and final claim of this article, namely that the sociolinguistic interference behind the German pronunciation of the short ‘a’ in English may have been reinforced by FL teaching in Germany. What would be required for corroboration of this claim is some sort of cross-sectional study of the approach to the teaching of English phonology practised in German schools. At the simplest level, this could be a record of how teachers impart the pronunciation of various lexical items containing the vowel TRAP (especially the/æ/ realization, since most modern German-to-English dictionaries still use [æ] as opposed to [a] to represent the short ‘a’ in their phonetic transcription of English headwords.)Footnote ¹⁹ The study would need to show whether it is, in fact, taught correctly from the start at ‘ab initio’ level, and, if so, how much reinforcement is involved in the teaching and how much correction is made for inaccurate pronunciation. Ideally, a subsequent follow-up study could assess how this initial teaching is approached at subsequent levels as beginners progress with their learning, but such a longitudinal approach is by no means required to gain an overall impression of what is happening ‘across the board’. Certainly, there can be no serious theoretical objection to different levels of teaching being observed to gain a general picture and, in fact, it might be interesting to observe what approach is taken at adult learner level, where pronunciation is long since likely to have become habitual – to say nothing of ‘beyond redemption’ à la Lenneberg (whose critical period hypothesis posits the existence of maturational constraints on language learning ability) – and where teachers may or may not consider it apposite to correct accent. Ultimately, it is teacher attitude and, certainly, knowledge of current usage that is critical.

Indeed, a survey of teacher attitudes and practices may well suffice to gain an early picture of common approaches to the teaching of English pronunciation in German educational contexts. Questions here may address not only how important teachers consider accurate pronunciation to be, but also whether or not they make reference to a particular model in their teaching and, if they do, whether they consider it to be a standard comparable with ‘Hochdeutsch’ and, possibly, whether or not this model differs from their own acquired pronunciation. Inclusion of the latter question would help to signal whether or not German teachers of English deem the model to be more important than genuine real-world usage.

Whichever approach is taken, German teachers of English need to recognize inaccurate pronunciation as a serious shortcoming, which can lead to significant misunderstanding in the processing of spoken language. Hence, the cohort for any such study described would need to be a sufficient number of German schools willing to be scrutinized with this view in mind and thus capable of making the research meaningful. Obviously, the easier the test is to deliver, the greater is the number of schools that could be involved.

TRAP is not the only problematic vowel for German learners of English. [ʌ] (the ‘standard lexical set STRUT’) is another instance, and again here we find contemporary terms of the computerized age such as backup [bakʌp] and button [bʌt^ǝn] being rendered erroneously as /bεkap/ and /bat^ǝn/ for the imported words Backup and Button respectively.Footnote ²⁰ The practice also extends to commonplace words with, for example, much [mʌtʃ] being articulated as match [matʃ], put [pʌt] as pat [pat] and cut [kʌt] as cat [kat] under this system. That the probability of misunderstanding increases as a result of such usage is all too evident. Unlike the short ‘a’, however, there would appear to be no case to argue for a vowel shift with which German English has failed to keep pace; rather, the /ʌ/ phoneme is absent from the set of German phonemes and this has conceivably led to a locally articulated vowel being sought as an alternative (albeit a front vowel for a back vowel).Footnote ²¹ Ironically, this is the very same vowel that Germans fail to pronounce in App and Handy, etc.

In summary, then, to shed light on the persistent use of inappropriate vowels among German speakers of English, this paper makes four claims: (1) that German pronunciation is rooted in past British usage; (2) that this usage has become fixed over time for German speakers; (3) that the codification of German is mistakenly applied to English; and (4) that such interference may well be perpetuated in the teaching of English in Germany. The last claim in particular can be tested provided that German teachers of English are willing to participate in the research. Certainly, one hopes the realization that the continued pronunciation of inapplicable variants over time makes the English taught increasingly less intelligible and thus even more open to listener misinterpretation will be incentive enough to persuade German teachers of English to become involved at this practical level.