Multilingual Gibberish

Lauren O'Neal
The Hairpin
Published in
1 min readMar 10, 2014

There are some people who speak several languages, and that’s great and I’m really impressed, but this girl can speak like twelve different kinds of gibberish! Swedish gibberish, Arabic gibberish, a whole United Nations meeting of gibberish! I don’t think I could pull this off even in English. Some are better than others — the Italian turned out so stereotypical she labeled it “Pizza” — but they’re all pretty interesting glimpses at what a language (kind of) sounds like to people who don’t speak it. (See also: this old Italian music video in a nonsense approximation of rock-and-roll-style English. It’s about 10% more decipherable than “Gimme Shelter.”)

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Lauren O'Neal
The Hairpin

Lauren O’Neal is a senior editor at Midnight Breakfast and cohosts the podcast Sunday School Dropouts.