I have taken up German again. I started studying it when I was 18 and had abandoned it for several years. It was a personal project that I wanted to get back on my feet and I think I’m getting there little by little. Since I started studying it, it has always been a language that I have enjoyed studying, especially because of the logic behind the word creations, but today I wanted to reflect on all the prejudices that this language and its speakers have to suffer.

Ever since I started telling people around me that I was studying German, I have been confronted with a number of preconceived ideas about the language, particularly the accent. It took me a while to realise what was behind it.

When someone tries to imitate the German accent, they tend to pronounce the R’s very loudly, speak very loudly and stress the lip and teeth sounds (b, p, t…) excessively (some spitting may even happen).

Nothing could be further from the truth for most German speakers. From the first time I heard someone speak German, it struck me that the “R” sound is a challenge for many Germans, as the guttural “R” (generally related to the French language) predominates. I will never forget a charming German teacher who told us that it was genetically impossible for her to pronounce the word perro (dog in Spanish). This teacher also had a very soft and soothing tone of voice.

So where does this idea that German is an aggressive, harsh language with such a strong and pronounced pronunciation come from? I am afraid there is a very clear reason and it is related to the darker side of German history.

First of all, let us consider who has been the most famous German speaker in recent history. Unfortunately, Hitler is the winner in this contest. We have seen and heard him on television ad nauseam, and usually, as with historical documents, they are not dubbed, but we hear him in his original German.

I don’t think it is necessary to say that Hitler’s pronunciation, accent and tone in the mass speeches we hear in the media are not representative of the German language. According to experts, he had a Lower Bavarian accent, where the strong and vibrant pronunciation of the “R” sound is more common. Because of the subject matter and the circumstances of his speeches, he pronounced strong sounds even louder for emphasis, shouted, gesticulated…. In short, he was an aggressive speaker and his accent reflected this aggressiveness.

It doesn’t help that the film industry is interested in perpetuating this myth of German language aggressiveness, since in all World War II films, Germans always play the bad guys, with some exceptions. Here’s a clip from a German film that went quite viral at the time, with Hitler shouting. I think the scene describes well why you can’t take a speaker of one language as an example that applies to all other speakers, especially if he is the most hated dictator in the history of Europe and always appears angry in every film:

A curious anecdote that has to do with German and the “R’s” is the controversy in which the band Rammstein was involved due to the strong pronunciation of the “R’s” made by the band’s singer, which made people accused the band of being neo-Nazi, since the Germans themselves relate these vibrant R’s to Hitler.

This association of prejudice with a language is very common in popular culture. Hasn’t something similar happened with the Russian language? How many bad Russians have we seen in films? In Spain we have other examples of accents that come with prejudice. The one that hurts me the most as an Andalusian is obviously the one that links Andalusian speech with uneducated and lazy speakers.

That’s why whenever you meet someone from another culture you should always assume that you don’t know anything about that person because you never know how many lies you are considering to be true.