Here’s something fun to brighten your day. It’s a song by Adriano Celentano, called “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” and it can, in equal parts, improve your work-out play list and tell you about how you’re perceived.
The song played between 1:39 and 4:55 was released on 3 November 1972, and quickly became a massive hit. If you listen to it without paying attention, it sounds weird and slurred, but otherwise like it could be a normal song. Pay more attention and the words get less intelligible. Pay even more attention, and you realise it’s gibberish.
But it’s not random gibberish. Adriano Celentano wrote the song as a playful imitation of popular American songs. The gibberish is what American-accented English sounds like to Italian speakers. The beginning of the video is a famous performance of the song, and you can see it’s set in a classroom with Celentano as a fake English teacher.
The song wasn’t done using careful phonetics. Celentano improvised the original lyrics. The sound of English has probably changed in the last 43 years. Still, it’s an interesting window into what English-speakers sound like to other people.
Note: Video gets very NSFW just after the end of the song. Be careful.