Non-native Pronunciations Of English

Non-native pronunciations of English result from the common linguistic phenomenon in which non-native users of any language tend to carry the intonation, phonological processes and pronunciation rules from their first language or first languages into their English speech. They may also create innovative pronunciations for English sounds not found in the speaker's first language.

Overview

The speech of non-native English speakers may exhibit pronunciation characteristics that result from their imperfectly learning the sound system of English, either by transferring the phonological rules from their mother tongue into their English speech ("interference") or through implementing strategies similar to those used in primary language acquisition. They may also create innovative pronunciations for English sounds not found in the speaker's first language.

The age at which speakers begin to immerse themselves into a language (such as English) is linked to the degree to which native speakers are able to detect a non-native accent; the exact nature of the link is disputed amongst scholars and may be affected by " neurological plasticity, cognitive development, motivation, psychosocial states, formal instruction, language learning aptitude", and the usage of their first (L1) and second (L2) languages.

English is unusual in that speakers rarely produce an audible release between consonant clusters and often overlap constriction times. Speaking English with a timing pattern that is dramatically different may lead to speech that is difficult to understand.

More transparently, differing phonological distinctions between a speaker's first language and English create a tendency to neutralize such distinctions in English, and differences in the inventory or distribution of sounds may cause substitutions of native sounds in the place of difficult English sounds and/or simple deletion. This is more common when the distinction is subtle between English sounds or between a sound of English and of a speaker's primary language. While there is no evidence to suggest that a simple absence of a sound or sequence in one language's phonological inventory makes it difficult to learn, several theoretical models have presumed that non-native speech perceptions reflect both the abstract phonological properties and phonetic details of the native language.

Non-native pronunciations may be transmitted to the children of learners, who will then exhibit a number of the same characteristics despite being native speakers themselves. For example, this process has resulted in many of the distinctive qualities of Irish English and Highland English which were heavily influenced by a Goidelic substratum.

Examples

Arabic

General features among most or all Arabic speakers:

* Confusion between as in ''sit'' and as in ''set'' , pronouncing both vowels as , , or .
* Difficulty distinguishing low sounds, as in ''bam'' and as in ''balm'' may both be realized as , , or depending on the speaker's dialect.
* Confusion between as in ''called'' and ''caught'' with as in ''cold'' and ''coat'', both being realized as or depending on the speaker's dialect.
* Speakers tend to speak with a rhotic accent and pronounce as or .

Catalan

*Devoicing of final consonants: to .
::E.g. ''phase'' can be pronounced like ''face'' (even though Catalan has both and phonemes).
*Vowel length confusions.
*Confusion of , usually realized as
*Confusion of , usually realized as .
*Confusion of , usually realized as .
*Confusion of , usually realized as or .
*Confusion of , usually realized as ( are only distinguished in Valencian and Balearic).
* Rhotic pronunciation, with pronounced as a trill or a flap .
*Difficulties with word-initial clusters involving , where an epenthetic ''e'' is usually added.
::E.g. ''stop'' being pronounced ''estop''.
*Simplification of some word consonant clusters.
::E.g. ''instant'' being pronounced ''instan''
*Narrower pitch range, with emphasis marked with extra length instead of extra pitch variation.
*Problems with variable stress.
::E.g. ''the blackbird'' vs. ''the black bird.''
*Problems with contrastive stress.
::E.g. ''with sugar or without sugar?'' (the second ''sugar'' is more heavily stressed)

Cantonese

* tends to be so ''this'' is is
* /ə/ tends to be so ''whether'' is .Deterding, D., Wong J., & Kirkpatrick, A. (2008). The pronunciation of Hong Kong English. ''English World-Wide'', 29, 148–149.
* There is less vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, and some variation in the placement of stress. For example, ''chocolate'' may be pronounced instead of .

Czech

These are the most common characteristics of the Czech pronunciation of English:
* Final devoicing of voiced consonants (e.g. "bet" and "bed" are both pronounced ), since non-sonorant consonants are always voiceless at the end of words in Czech. Some speakers may pronounce consonant-final English words with a strong vocalic offset, especially in isolated words (e.g. "dog" can be ).
* Czech is alveolar trill. There is a tendency to pronounce the trill in English and in all positions where is written.
* Final -er (-or) pronounced as syllabic alveolar trill (e.g. "water" sounds ). Stressed tends to be realized as (e.g. "bird" ).
* Tendency to realize both and as , since does not exist in Czech.
* Tendency to pronounce the initial cluster as (e.g. "write" ).
* Tendency to realize as or , since does not exist in Czech.
* Tendency to substitute as or , since does not exist in Czech.
* Tendency to pronounce as voiced (e.g. "how" ).
* Tendency not to aspirate the stops (e.g. "keep" sounds instead of ), since these stop consonants are not aspirated in Czech.
* is often realised as , so that "had" sounds like "head" , homophonous with "hat".
* Schwa does not exist in Czech. Speakers tend to pronounce it as (e.g. "a table" ) or (e.g. "China" ).
* Tendency to realise as or (e.g. "singing" ), because Czech is an allophone of before velar stops.
* Tendency to isolate all words in speech, because the liaison is unusual in Czech. For instance, "see it" tends to be pronounced , rather than .
* The melody of the Czech language is not so strong as in English. Czech speakers may sound monotonous to an English ear.

Dutch

These are some of the most significant errors a Dutch speaker might have:

;Pronunciation of consonants

* Speakers have difficulty with dental fricatives, often pronouncing as (failing to contrast ''then'' and ''den'') or (especially between vowels). Similarly, the dental fricative is replaced by or , though Belgian speakers may pronounce both and as in word-final position.
* The voiced stops and fricatives undergo terminal devoicing, especially in stressed syllables, causing ''feed'' and ''feet'' to be pronounced as the latter. Similarly, Dutch voicing assimilation patterns may be applied to English utterances so that, for example, ''iceberg'' is pronounced as , and ''if I'' as .
* Speakers have difficulty with the glottalization of , either not pronouncing it or applying it in the wrong contexts so that ''good morning'' is pronounced .
* The voiceless stops lack aspiration in stressed syllable-initial context.
*Medial /t/ is replaced by /d/ so that ''better'' is pronounced as .
* The postalveolar sibilants tend to be pronounced as their alveolo-palatal equivalents in Dutch: ; beginners may pronounce them as alveolar (and voiceless) or in syllable-final positions, leading to ''wish'' being pronounced as .
* may be confused with and with in initial position.
* may be strongly pharyngealized, even in contexts where dark l doesn't normally appear in English. Beginners may insert an epenthetic schwa between and a following , leading to ''milk'' being pronounced as .
* could pose difficulties for certain regional dialects which lack /h/, such as in Zeelandic and West Flemish.
* is replaced by , which English listeners may perceive as .
* The alveolar consonants /t, d, n, s, z, l/ are articulated with the blade of the tongue, rather than the tip as in English.

;Pronunciation of vowels

* Speakers have difficulty distinguishing between and , so that ''man'' and ''men'' are both pronounced as the latter.
* Speakers have difficulty distinguishing between and , so that ''pool'' and ''pull'' are both pronounced with . Some advanced speakers may employ a glide �y
* /iː/ is pronounced closer, tenser, and sometimes shorter than usual. Some advanced speakers might over-compensate for the length with a diphthong like �i
* /ʌ/ is replaced by � Spelling might cause confusion with /ɒ/ in words like ''wonder'', ''nothing'' and ''lovely''.
* British English /ɒ/ is replaced by �
* British English /ɜː/ is replaced by the sequence in Dutch /ør/, with significant lip-rounding and r-insertion.
* /eɪ/ is replaced by ː
* /əʊ/ is replaced by ː More advanced speakers might use the Dutch diphthong ːu
* /aɪ/ tends to be overly long before fortis consonants, giving the impression of a following lenis consonant.

French

* Because of the phonetic differences between English and French rhotics, speakers may perceive English , allophonically labialized to , as -like and have trouble distinguishing between and .
* French speakers have difficulty with and many delete it, as most French dialects do not have this sound.
* French speakers have difficulty with dental fricatives and (since these sounds do not exist in French). In France they may be pronounced as and , while in Quebec, Canada, the usual substitution is and .
* Speakers tend not to make a contrast between (as in ''ship'') and . (as in ''sheep'').

German

* Speakers may not velarize in coda positions as most native speakers do.
* German has a smaller pitch range, less consonant cluster reduction, and less vowel reduction.
* German features terminal devoicing, which is often carried over to English (creating homophones in cub/cup, had/hat, etc.)
* German features neither ("the") nor ("think"), and both are often realised as either /s/ or /f/ (think/sink, thought/fought, etc.)
* German speakers tend to realise (written in English) as (also written in German) when speaking English.
* The German /r/ is realised differently from the English /r/. Whereas in the former case the tongue touches the uvula, in the latter case it does not.

Greek

* Greek speakers tend to struggle with the difference between and .
* and can be replaced by or .
* tend to be unaspirated.
* Greek speakers may pronounce the English rhotic as a flap .
* The closest sound to English in Greek is , and speakers may substitute this sound in words like ''house''.

Hebrew

* The lack of discrimination in Hebrew between tense and lax vowels makes correctly pronouncing English words such as ''hit''/''heat'' and ''cook''/''kook'' difficult.
* The dental fricatives (as in "the") and (as in "think") are often mispronounced.
* Hebrew speakers may confuse and .
* In Hebrew, word stress is usually on the last (ultimate) or penultimate syllable of a word; speakers may carry their stress system into English, which has a much more varied stress system. Hebrew speakers may also use Hebrew intonation patterns which mark them as foreign speakers of English.

Hungarian

* The dental fricatives and may be realised as and respectively.
* Since Hungarian lacks the phoneme , many Hungarian speakers substitute for when speaking in English. A less frequent practice is hypercorrection: substituting for in instances where the latter is actually correct.
* In Hungarian phonology, in obstruent clusters, retrograde voicing assimilation occurs, so voiced consonants change to their voiceless counterparts if a voiceless consonant follows them and voiceless consonants change to their voiced counterparts if a voiced consonant follows them. While in English, it's the other way around. e.g. pronouncing ''dropped'' as  r ɔ́ b dinstead of  r ɔ́ p t

Italian

Studies on Italian speakers' pronunciation of English revealed the following characteristics:
* Tendency to realise as ("singer" rhymes with "finger") or as because Italian is an allophone of before velar stops.
* Difficulty with English vowels
** and are pronounced (''ship'' and ''sheep'' are homophones);
** (in certain words) and are pronounced (''bad'' and ''bed'' are homophones);
** (in certain words), , and are pronounced (''bat'', ''but'', and ''bath'' are homophones);
** and are pronounced (''cook'' and ''kook'' are homophones);
**Speakers tend to have little difficulty with , though some might pronounce it as or ).
**The pronunciation of , , and are variable, pronounced as or .
* The sequence in words like ''bottle'' is realized as , , or .
* Tendency to realise word-initial with , e.g. ''small'' . This voicing also applies to and . The main reason is that the letter "s" is always pronounced as before a voiced consonant in Italian.
* Italian does not have dental fricatives:
** Voiceless may be realised as or .
** Voiced may be realised as .
* Since and are typically pronounced as dental stops anyway, words like ''there'' and ''dare'' can become homophones.
* Tendency to pronounce , , as unaspirated stops.
* Schwa does not exist in Italian; speakers tend to give the written vowel its full pronunciation, e.g. ''lemon'' , ''television'' , ''parrot'' , ''intelligent'' , ''water'' , ''sugar'' .
* Italian speakers may pronounce consonant-final English words with a strong vocalic offset, especially in isolated words, e.g. ''dog'' .
* Tendency to realise as ; a trill rather than the native approximant ~, even when the dialect of English they are learning is nonrhotic.

In addition, Italians learning English have a tendency to pronounce words as they are spelled, so that ''walk'' is , ''guide'' is , and ''boiled'' is . This is also true for loanwords borrowed from English as ''water'' (water closet), which is pronounced instead of .

Japanese

* Speakers tend to confuse and both in perception and production, since the Japanese language has only one liquid phoneme /r/, whose possible realizations include central and lateral . Speakers may also hear English as similar to the Japanese .

Portuguese

Various pronunciation mistakes are bound to happen among Brazilian L2 speakers of English, among which:

;Pronunciation of vowels

* Confusion of and , usually realized as , and of and , usually realized as .
* Especially in a British context, confusion of and . The Brazilian is equivalent to RP English , and English orthography rarely makes a clear demarcation between the phonemes, thus ''cold'' (ideally ) might be homophone with ''called'' . The North American equivalent of British , , may be easier to perceive as it closely resembles the Portuguese diphthong . Speakers may also have trouble distinguishing between schwa and .
* In a British context, the diphthong might also be pronounced as the Portuguese diphthong ''eu'', .
* Persistent preference for over (even if the target pronunciation is England's prestige accent), and use of within the IPA space (Portuguese is often , what makes it even more due to confusion in production and perception), so that ''can't'', even in RP, might sound like an American pronunciation of ''Kent''. Some might even go as far as having instead of for ''last''

;Pronunciation of consonants

*Difficulty with dental fricatives and . These may be instead fronted , stopped or hissed .
*Speakers may pronounce word-initial r as a guttural ar pronunciations or a trill). These often sound to English speakers as , leading to confusion between ''ray'' and ''hay'', ''red'' and ''head'', ''height'' and ''right'', etc.
* Neutralization of coda , giving preference to a multitude of nasal vowels (often forming random diphthongs with , or also randomly losing them, so that ''sent'' and ''saint'', and ''song'' and ''sown'', are homophonous) originating from their deletion. Vowels are also often strongly nasalized when stressed and succeeded by a nasal consonant, even if said consonant starts a full syllable after it.
* Fluctuation of the levels of aspiration of voiceless stops , that might sound like .
* Loss of contrast between coronal stops and post-alveolar affricates due to palatalization of the earlier, before vowels such as , , , and .
*Epenthetic to break up consonant clusters.
* Palatalization due to epenthetic , so that ''night'' sounds slightly like ''nightch'' ( rather than ) and ''light'' sounds like ''lightchie'' ( rather than ).
* Loss of unstressed, syllable-final to palatalization, so that ''city'' sounds slightly like ''sitch'' ( rather than ).
* Post-alveolar affricates are easily confused with their fricative counterparts , often merging ''chip'' and ''ship'', ''cheap'' and ''sheep'', and ''pledger'' and ''pleasure''.
* Absence of contrast of voice for coda fricatives. ''He's'', ''hiss'' and ''his'' are easily homophonous. Spelling pronunciations, with all words with historical schwas left in the orthography being pronounced even when the usual would be , are also possible.
* English is less prone to perfect liaison-style sandhi than Portuguese, Spanish and French might be. Often, two identical or very similar consonants follow each other within a row, each in a different word, and both should be pronounced. Brazilians might either perform epenthesis or delete one of them. As such, ''this stop'' is produced either or , instead of the native
* In Portuguese, the semivowels and may be vocalized to their corresponding vowels ( and , respectively). so that ''I love you'' is pronounced . These semivowels may also be epenthetically inserted between vowels of very dissimilar qualities.
* With the exception of (here represented with a loss of contrast at the end of a word) and , consonants tend to not elide corresponding to or assimilate to the next word's phoneme, even in connected speech. This means, for example, occasional epenthesis even if the following word starts in a vowel, as in their native language (''not' really'').

Russian

* There is no in Russian; speakers typically substitute .
* Native Russian speakers tend to produce an audible release for final consonants and in consonant clusters and are likely to transfer this to English speech, creating inappropriate releases of final bursts that sound overly careful and stilted and even causing native listeners to perceive extra unstressed syllables.
* Word-initial voiceless stops , , may not be aspirated by Russian speakers (following the pattern in Russian), which may sound to native English speakers as , , instead. However, at least one study challenges this, with Russian-accented English speakers in the study aspirating the voiceless consonants just as much as General American English speakers, and even more than General American speakers.
* Word-final obstruents are pronounced voiceless in Russian even if spelled with letters otherwise denoting their voiced counterparts, and speakers may fail to pronounce word-final voiced obstruents in English correctly, substituting for etc.
* There are no dental fricatives ( and ) in Russian, and native Russian speakers may pronounce them respectively as or or and as or .
* Difficulty with English vowels. Russian speakers may have difficulty distinguishing and , and , and and ; similarly, speakers' pronunciation of long vowels may sound more like their close counterpart (e.g. may sound closer to )
* Speakers typically realise English as a trilled , the native Russian rhotic.
* Likewise, may be pronounced like its closest Russian equivalent, .
* Since there is no in Russian, speakers typically produce or instead.
* The voiced palato-alveolar affricate may be realised as a sequence of a stop and a fricative: .
* The voiceless palato-alveolar affricate may be pronnounced as its closest Russian equivalent, .
* The postalveolar fricatives and may be realised as their closest Russian equivalent, and .
* The consonant cluster may be realised as an affricate, .
* The "clear" alveolar may be realised as Russian , sounding closer to English "dark" velarised .
* Consonants written twice in English may be pronounced geminated by Russian speakers.

Spanish

*Vowel length confusions.
*Confusion of , usually realized as
*Confusion of , usually realized as .
*Confusion of , usually realized as .
*Confusion of , usually realized as .
*Since Spanish does not make voicing contrasts between its fricatives (and its one affricate), speakers may neutralize contrasts between and ; likewise, fricatives may assimilate the voicing of a following consonant.
* Rhotic pronunciation, with /r/ pronounced as a trill or a flap �
* Cuban and Central American speakers tend to merge with , and with .
* and often have a fluctuating degree of closure.
* For the most part (especially in colloquial speech), Spanish allows only five (or six) word-final consonants: , , , , and ; speakers may omit word-final consonants other than these, or alter them (for example, by turning to or ).
* In Spanish, must immediately precede or follow a vowel; often a word beginning with + consonant will obtain an epenthetic vowel (typically ) to make ''stomp'' pronounced rather than .
* In Spanish, the phoneme exists only in (most dialects of) Spain; where this sound appears in English, speakers of other Spanish dialects replace with , or .
* Speakers tend to merge and , pronouncing both as a plosive unless they occur in intervocalic position, in which case they are pronounced as a fricative. A similar process occurs with and , because does not exist in Spanish.
* The three nasal phonemes of Spanish neutralize in coda-position; speakers may invariably pronounce nasal consonants as homorganic to a following consonant; if word-final (as in ''welcome'') common realizations include , deletion with nasalization of the preceding vowel, or .
*Devoicing of final consonants.
*Narrower pitch range, with emphasis marked with extra length instead of extra pitch variation.
*Problems with variable stress.
::E.g. ''the blackbird.'' vs. ''the black bird.''
*Problems with contrastive stress.
::E.g. ''with sugar or without sugar?''
::(the second ''sugar'' is more heavily stressed)

Vietnamese

Note: There are three main dialects in Vietnamese, a northern one centered on Hanoi, a central one centered on Huế, and a southern one centered on Ho Chi Minh City.
* Speakers may not produce final consonants since there are fewer final consonants in Vietnamese and those that do exist differ in their phonetic quality:
**Final is likely to be confused with .
**Final is likely to be confused with .
**Final is likely to be omitted.
**Final is likely to be confused with , but some Vietnamese pronounce the word ''bell'' as .
**Final is likely to be confused with by southern Vietnamese.
* Speakers also have difficulty with English consonant clusters, with segments being omitted or epenthetic vowels being inserted.
*Speakers may not aspirate initial , , and , native English-speakers think that they pronounce as and . For example, when Vietnamese people pronounced the word ''tie'', native English-speakers think that they say the word ''die'' or ''dye''.
*Speakers often have difficulty with the following phonemes and confuse them, which may depend in some cases upon where in Vietnam they are originally from:
** with , .
** with , .
** with (especially in southern dialects).
** with .
** with .
** with or .
** with by northern Vietnamese.
** with , , or by northern Vietnamese.
** with by southern Vietnamese.
** with .
** with or .
** with .
*Vietnamese is a tonal language and speakers may try to use the Vietnamese tonal system or use a mid tone with English words, but they pronounce with a high tone when the closed syllable is followed by . They may also associate tones onto the intonational pattern of a sentence and become confused with such inflectional changes.

See also

* Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages
* Pronunciation of English
* Non-native speech database
* International Dialects of English Archive
* Accent reduction
* Koiné language
* Shibboleth

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

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External links

Speech Accent Archive
(most recordings also have an IPA transcription)
International Dialects of English Archive

{{DEFAULTSORT:Non-Native Pronunciations Of English
English as a second or foreign language
*Non-native pronunciations of English
English phonology
Dialects of English
Language acquisition
Language comparison