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I've noticed that Germans and Indians will sometimes say "/w/ector space" instead of "/v/ector space".

I get that in German "w" is pronounced /v/. But "vau" (German "v") is pronounced like /f/. So what would make people pronounce an English "vee" like an English "double-u"? (As far as I know, German doesn't even have an "English double-u" letter; if they want to indicate that sound, they would use a "u" like English "quick" or Spanish "güero".)

I've also noticed that it's only in certain cases, for example I haven't heard Indians or Germans pronounced "However" as "Hovewer".

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  • I haven't noticed Germans or Indians pronouncing v as w, but I definitely have heard Russians do so. I've also heard mainland Chinese pronounce z as g ("Three, two, one, gero!")
    – Dan Bron
    Nov 13, 2014 at 13:01
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    @DanBron As hard g, not j?
    – isomorphismes
    Nov 13, 2014 at 13:03
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    It think some of your perceived pronunciations are actually different. I doubt any German will agree with the "v" pronounced like /f/. The "f" in "fussbal" is most definitely not the same as the "v" in "verloren" and that again is different from the "w" in "wasser". And the "w" in wasser comes quite close to the double-u sound. Use of the "u" in German to indicate a consonant seems rare, if it exists at all. All that said, I think a question about German pronunciation (or Indian) may be off-topic here.
    – oerkelens
    Nov 13, 2014 at 13:05
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    @BCdotNET I'm not sure. See the "hambag/handbag" question on this site, which is also linguistic-y-ish.
    – isomorphismes
    Nov 13, 2014 at 13:07
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    @oerkelens Well, this Q is about pronunciation of English, not of German.
    – isomorphismes
    Nov 13, 2014 at 13:08

5 Answers 5

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It's hypercorrection.

Germans can pronounce the English 'v' just fine, they happen to write it as 'w'.

So the freshman English learner from Germany will pronounce (using English orthography/pronunciation) 'water' as 'vawter'.

They'll then start to associate the 'v' sound with a mistake.

So the sophomore reasoning, which results in fixing some problems, for a German speaking English will be to change anything that sounds as 'v' to a 'w'.

Even though 'vector' is written with a 'v' (and pronounced that way in English, a German might over correct and 'fix' the 'v' and use the 'w' sound instead.

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  • Also, note that many of the words with /w/ in English have cognates pronounced with /v/ in German. For example, the word Wasser means water but is pronounced vahsser.
    – Peter Shor
    Nov 13, 2014 at 15:16
  • The W in German is hard, not soft like a V. German has a /v/ too, which is pronounced exactly like in English. Consider the German word 'wieviel' (how much). The /w/ is hard but the /v/ is soft. Wasser is pronounced wahsser not vahsser. The /w/ is pronounced with the teeth on the bottom lip, so not with open mouth like the English /w/
    – Michiel van der Blonk
    Aug 12, 2022 at 16:22
  • @MichielvanderBlonk I am not a native German speaker but I am familiar with it and general linguistics so what you say is confusing to me. I don't know what 'hard' and 'soft' are (those are not generally recognized words used in phonology). Also '/' is used to surround IPA symbols which might be different than you expect from how regular writing works. What I have learned about German is that a word initial roman character 'w' as in German 'Wasser' is pronounced starting with voiced labiodental fricative, but the 'w' in English 'water' is pronounced as a bilabial glide (or semi-vowel).
    – Mitch
    Aug 12, 2022 at 16:45
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We have a tendency to think that speakers of languages that have a similar consonant phoneme must pronounce it in the same way, but this is not so. For example, both Czech /p/ and /English /p/ are unvoiced labial stops, but the prevocalic English /p/is aspirated, and the Czech is not. As a result, Czech speakers producing the word pan with an initial Czech /p/ may sound to an English listener as if they saying ban. Trained phoneticians producing narrow phonetic transcriptions of the words produced by Czech and English speakers would use superscript notations to show this, but they would use the same phonetic symbol, [p], in both versions for the one to which they added superscript.

It's a similar situation with the /v/ sound. Most speakers of English pronounce their version of this with a degree of friction as the air passes between the lower lip and the upper teeth; Most speakers of German pronounce their /v/ with much less friction. If they use the German sound in an English word, it can sound to an English listener like /w/.

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    +1 (btw, don't know if it's worth adding that prevocalic /p/ is aspirated unless it's preceded by /s/)
    – Araucaria - Him
    Nov 13, 2014 at 13:54
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I don't know why many Germans say "wictory" for "victory", for example. The initial consonant in German "wasser" (water) is pronounced quite like the voiced [v] in English "victory", so it's certainly not the case that the phoneme is difficult for them to produce.

The initial consonant in German "Vater" (father) is very close to the unvoiced first consonant in English "father".

One might expect to hear them say "Fictory" for "Victory", not "Wictory". My guess is that it's simply a confusion of which sounds go with which letters.

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    Where would you put the German pronunciation in "Fahrrat", then? That "f" does not sound to any German like the "v" in "Vater", but to my ear it sounds a lot closer to the "f" in "father".
    – oerkelens
    Nov 13, 2014 at 14:05
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    American English is my native language, but I did spend a while in Germany, but apparently not long enough for my ear to detect much of a difference in the initial consonants of Fahrrad and Vater. I would attribute any slight difference to the quality of the vowel. But those differences are tiny compared to the differences between 'victory' and 'wictory'. I wonder if it can be traced to the study of Latin in elementary school? How do Germans say dominus vobiscum?
    – Tim
    Nov 13, 2014 at 14:17
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    @oerkelens "does not sound ... like"? Really? They're both unvoiced labiodental fricatives, right? If not, then what? If so, then what further details make them different?
    – Mitch
    Nov 13, 2014 at 14:25
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    @Mitch: I am afraid I lack the vocabulary to accurately describe the difference... but the difference is quite big to my ear. In (my native) Dutch we have the same distinction, and pronouncing Dutch vrijheid as frijheid would sound as wrong to a Dutchman as pronouncing the cognate Freiheit as Vreiheit to a German. If I pronounce both, the "v" seems lightly voiced and the pressure between teeth and lip is less than with the "f". I pronounce wine, vine and fine differently. Are any of those the same for you?
    – oerkelens
    Nov 13, 2014 at 14:32
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    @oerkelens: looking up Dutch and German phonology in Wikipedia, Dutch indeed has a three-way distinction between 'f', 'v', and 'w' (all three of which probably sound either like /f/ or /v/ to native English speakers), but standard German does not; in German 'f' and 'v' are pronounced the same. It's quite possible—I don't know one way or the other—that the dialect of German spoken near the Netherlands has this distinction. If it does, this would explain the disagreement in the comments above.
    – Peter Shor
    Nov 13, 2014 at 15:21
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English novels are filled with Britons who say v for w, and w for v. They are neither German nor Indian, but characters like Sam Weller and his father Tony, in "Pickwick Papers" constantly make statements such as "Vell, the gentleman must have wanished before my eyes. Wot do you think, Samivel?" (The last being Dad's pronuciation of Samuel.) Dickens seemed to use this as a class distinction. Perhaps no one actually talks like that any more, and perhaps they never did?

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  • please excuse typo..
    – Listera
    Sep 8, 2016 at 21:25
  • Isn't Dickens writing English with a Yiddish/Germanic accent, so this is exactly the phenomenon?
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    Sep 8, 2016 at 21:37
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    @AndrewLeach Supposedly an attempt at 19thc Cockney which is entirely non-foreign influenced.
    – Mitch
    Sep 9, 2016 at 0:38
  • @Mitch In that case, this post does not address the question of why Germans and others who pronounce w as [v] overcompensate with the letter v. It's simply a comment that it appears the phenomenon isn't limited to Germanic/Slavic language-speakers.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    Sep 9, 2016 at 7:57
  • @Andrew Yes, this important information but more relevant to a comment
    – Mitch
    Sep 9, 2016 at 11:09
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Wow, such complicated answers. I’m no linguist, but I think it’s simply because in their native language they don’t use a “v” sound, and instead it comes out naturally as a w sound. Eg, there’s a lot of news today about the volcano in Las Palmos, and the majority of Indian newscasters in English say, “The wolcano....” It’s because there is no v sound in their native speech, so the v sound is not easy to produce. The same reason why I can’t roll my r’s easily when speaking French, because I didn’t grow up rolling my r’s.

An Indian who speaks English professionally (eg a newscaster speaking to an English audience, or an English teacher) can practice to say the v sound, but I think it takes a lot of work, judging by how many of my friends from India still say v words with a w sound, including teachers and newscasters.

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