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Half a million people watched this on YouTube over the past couple of weeks:

Gawker headlined this as "What English Sounds Like to People Who Don't Speak It" (10/18/2011).

If you've ever wanted to know what English sounds like when you don't speak it, here's a short film from Australian director Brian Fairbairn that might help you get an idea. Think of it as the dramatic version of Italian singer Adriano Celentano's classic English-sounding gibberish song "Prisencolinensinainciusol."

But whether you should think of it that way depends on whether you want to distinguish among kinds of nonsense. And we here at Language Log are committed to taxonomies of nonsense that are as elaborate as possible.

Celentano's Prisencolinensinainciusol is entirely nonsense, but built out of fake-Elvis phonetics. Brian Fairbairn's Skwerl includes real English function words and common content words, with otherwise contentless content that is tossed off in a way that makes it hard to remember:

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A: Did you __?

B: Yeah, I __. I __ today.

A: Oh, the __ man with an __?

This in turn is different from Jabberwocky, where the content words are a purposefully memorable series of re-purposed archaisms, morphological blends, and phonetic symbolism; or Unwinese, where there is a certain amount of morpholexical invention, but the crucial disconnect seems to be semantic and pragmatic (though in the regions where the words are all made up, Unwinese can be fairly close to Skwerl). There's Dario Fo's Grammelot and its relatives, mythical and otherwise. And these are all different from the mode of doubletalk where content is replaced by a description of its rhetorical goals ("Pragmatics as comedy", 1/28/2010).

Skwerl is more like the SNL take-off "British Movie", except that it doesn't depend on the idea of inter-dialect incomprehension. Really, Skwerl is less like "what English sounds like when you don't speak it", and more like "What English probably sounds like if you're suffering from Wernicke's aphasia".

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