Talk:Non-native pronunciations of English/Archive 2

Indian as non-native?

Is it correct to list the Indian subcontinent under non-native users? I thought that many Indians speak English as their first language.

Re: Indian as non-native?

There are at lest 35 million first-langage speakers of Indian English, and their dialect is as "correct" and legitimate as any other variation. It's a bit unclear what standard is being applied. International English

There are also quite a few Indian speakers who have learned English as a second language. It'd be really nice if we could somehow outline differences between the two but that's probably pretty difficult. My main beef is that there are so many different languages in India, it's sort of like having a "Continental-European accent" section. AEuSoes1 04:02, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Johannes Hüsing

Yes it's true that there are many different languages in India, each with its own phonology. Nonetheless, there are broad areal (pertaining to an area) similarities in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. "Defining a Linguistic Area" by Colin Masica is an excellent, exhaustive examination of how to define "South Asia" as a linguist area distinct from those of other parts of the word. Here, what is most releveant are the many ways that Indian languages' phonologies resemble each other but different from English phonology. The use of retroflex rather than alveolar stops, the absence of labio-dental fricatives /θ/ /ð/, the presence of pure phonemic vowels instead of English blends /uʷ/ /oʷ/ /eʲ/ /iʲ/, syllable-timed instead of stress-timed speech, etc. are some of the trans-Indian features that can be included here.

Of course, it would be a good idea to also have sections on the particular languages and how they differ. Urdu speakers, for example, generally are able to pronounce /z/ and /f/, while these are real problems for speakers from the east and south. Tamil speakers tend to insert /j/ ( "y" sound for those not familiar with IPA) before words beginning with /e/ or /ε/. Telugu speakers insert word-final /u/. Interlingua 13:49, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't think we should be too worried about what we call "native" users. Surely most Irish people speak English as their daily "native" language. At the other extreme, you could list the United States in this aticle, as people may have, for example, Spanish / Polish / Yiddish -speaking influences. Andy G 00:05, 4 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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I heard a German friend pronouncing "job" as "chop". I thought she talked about some "shop", since "chop" wouldn't make sense in the sentence. I am a swedish ESL speaker myself, though, which could have added to the misunderstanding. Hmmm, it seems like some voicing/devoicing mistake.

English sounds & Rarity

I have heard that the "u" in nurse and the "th" sound are among the rarest sounds worldwide (i.e. they occur in very few languages besides English). Is this true, and is this article a good place to put information about this? Tuf-Kat 03:42, Sep 23, 2003 (UTC)

I hear the th's are rare too. But the u in nurse is just schwa (like in nerdy), which is exceedingly common. How do you pronounce it? --Menchi 03:48, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I don't think nurse has the schwa /ə/ sound. It has /ɝ/. The following two sounds are allophones in English: /ə/ and /ʌ/. The former is found in unstressed syllables (about, lemon, university); that latter is found in stressed syllables (under). The sound /ɝ/ is quite distinct and in the dialects of English that I know of is not an allophone (a "acceptable variation") of /ə/ or /ʌ/.I usually tell my students that the least common vocalic phoneme in English is /ʊ/, as in push, look, put, stood, etc. And that sound seems quite rare in other languages.

As for /δ/ or /θ/, one and/or the other exits in English, Icelandic (/ð/ only), Greek, Arabic (Gulf), Burmese, Mohave, Arapaho, Huastec, Mixtec, Otomi, Yapese, Albanian, Welsh, Lakkia (a Tai language), Danish (/ð/ only) and continental Spanish (but /δ/ only as an allphone for /d/ in intervocalic or word-final position). These are from the notes I've taken from Ruhlen, Merritt, A Guide to the Languages of the World, Stanford University Press. They include only a few hundred of the languages for which he gave phonemic inventories.Interlingua 14:10, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I pronounce it with the same sound as the "e" in nerd, or the "u" in turd or blurb or curd, or the "i" in bird, or the "o" in word. Perhaps I'm remembering the wrong example word, but I seem to remember that there is an extremely rare "u" sound in English. Tuf-Kat 04:03, Sep 23, 2003 (UTC)

The "a" in the word "father" is not a common vowel. Perhaps this is what you actually meant?

Maybe he's referring to an American pronunciation. Rhotic vowels aren't very common. However, is /A/ so rare? I don't think so.

Yeah, I believe th(both sounds) are quite rare. The u in nurse is a long schwa, a different level than the short Schwa, and probably much less common...

Vancouverguy 21:51, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

According to Peter Ladefoged in Vowels and Consonants the American English vowel /ɝ/ in her, sir, and fur occurs as a vowel in less than 1% of the world's languages.AEuSoes1 23:51, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

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Overall, this page doesn't really same very fair...and I am a native English speaker. Given all the atrocious mispronunciations I've heard English speakers do of other languages, perhaps we should create a parallel page: Native English pronunciations of non-English languages. --Sewing 01:56, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Absolutely there should be such pages, in the plural. The purpose of this article isn't to make fun of learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL) but to help identify likely problems they have, especially in pronunciation. So, fairness doens't seem the most relevant issue here. Accuracy, clarity, comprehensive and priority all seem more important to me here. I would very much like to contribute to any pages that might be written, Sewing, on problems anglophone native speakers have when learning languages I'm familiar with: Spanish, Hindi, Tamil, Korean, Turkish. Interlingua 04:36, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

If you can contribute, Interlingua, that'd be great. But these pages are not "designed to help identify and remedy problems" with language acquisition. Wikipedia's role is an encyclopedia not an instructional guide. AEuSoes1 06:32, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Shaking of heads by Indians

Does this come under pronunciation? -- Paddu 10:18, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Tendency to pronounce /Q/ as /O/ ("cot" => "caught"), or, more rarely, as /a/. (This cot-caught merger also occurs with a large number of North American native speakers of English.)

It isn't the same thing. Italians pronounce "cot" and "caught" as a Southern Englishman pronounces "court", whereas in North America they're Southern English "cart".

Brazilians speeking English

The article about how Brazilians speak English is lovely: "cheecher" LOL. In the article, it lacks: if a Brazilian says Happy and Rap in English. Both sounds sound the same: "rapi" (with a Portuguese/french-like r). -Pedro 18:20, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

When Brazilians say Happy and Rap in English, they sound like "hep-pee" in English, since we confuse "e" and "ae". -Lira (I'm still a noob and I don't know what time it is :p)

Scandinavians

I've noticed that people from Scandinavia often have no distinguishable accent at all, and often sound like native born speakers. A famous example - Famke Janssen. I don't just mean speak English well - people can speak English fluently but still have a noticable accent - but Scandinavians seem to naturally adopt the accent of whatever country they are in -US, Australia etc.

Janssen's Dutch, actually (not Scandinavian). Iben Hjejle (from (Denmark) is a better example. According to the High Fidelity DVD director's commentary, Stephen Frears really loved the way she looked in Mifune, but despaired that she wouldn't sound American, until he found out that she had learned English by spending four years or so in the U.S. That might be the case with Janssen, or maybe she's just really good at accents. She is an actress, after all - a lot of them (though certainly not all) are excellent at assuming different accents (see Christian Bale - he's Welsh, but he often plays Americans, and I bet a lot of Americans have no idea). For what it's worth, I've met a few Scandinavians (two Danes, one Swede), and they all had noticeable accents. --Skoosh 19:50, 17 July 2005 (UTC) (Note: Actually Denmark is considered part of Scandinavia)

Japanese again

I've never heard that thing about switching F and P sounds. H, sometimes, but never P. Is this a regional thing within Japan? Because I think the person who wrote that might be mixing up Japanese and Korean (where they do that incessantly.) Also Japanese has the same issue with yes/no in answer to a negative question that native english speakers do in english. -User:Andy Christ

IPA

So we're going with standardization at the cost of readability? -User:Andy Christ

As demonstrated on this very talk page, it's impossible to reliably use actual words or letters as concrete examples of phonemes, because there's variation in pronunciation of practically every word, letter, or combination of letters in the English language worldwide. For example, someone used "the vowel in 'nurse'" as an example of an uncommon sound. But which sound is that, exactly? It's different not only between Britain and North America, but between different areas within each region, and different social classes, and ethnicities, and... So yes, IPA should be used here, because discussions of exact phonetics for a broad and diverse audience is exactly why IPA was invented. "Readability" of ordinary English orthography, under these circumstances, is a comfortable illusion. --Skoosh 19:37, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

IPA is a little annoying in the beginning, but its use soon pays off. They aren't that many new symbols to learn for any one language (here, English) or for any pair of languages (here, English and the L1, or native language). Most speakers of a given language, let's say Japanese, won't be bothered to learn the entire set of IPA symobls, just those relevant to the phonemic inventory (and also for allophonic variations) of L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English). It'll be fewer than two dozen new symbols. And note, these will be symbols for sounds they really have to learn to distinguish. Given the hundreds of grammar rules and thousands of words they're going to have to learn, two dozen symbols isn't asking too much.

In my experience as an ESL teacher, IPA works very well since it brings home three important facts:

1. You can't trust orthography, especially in English, to give you sufficient information on the the pronunciation of words. phoney and money are deceptively similar. But in IPA students can more easiliy see the differences: [foʷ.nɪ] and [mʌ.nɪ]
2. L2 really is making distinctions that must be mastered. Luke [luːk] and look [lʊk]. Japanese doesn't make this distinction, but English most certainly does and it's a required feature of the language.
3. The differences between the phonemic and allophonic inventories of L1 and L2 really are different and shouldn't be ignored. Seeing the IPA transcriptions of (Japanese) Tokyo [toː.kjoː] or perhaps [tɤː.kjɤː] and (English) Tokyo [tʰoʷ.ki.joʷ] will give the student--in a clear, non-ephemeral form--a way to study the differences between L1 and L2. Speech itself is neither clear nor non-ephemeral: the sounds come in a tumble and are gone in an instant. Of course, better than simply giving scattered words is to show the student the two complete phonemic inventories, each in a differnt chart organized accoring to IPA conventions. Interlingua 04:57, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Original research?

I've added the {{Unsourced}} tag to this page because as far as I can tell, there are no cited sources here, but just vague impressions people have of various foreign accents, which amounts to very unscientific original research. Please add references to published sources where these non-native pronunciations are discussed. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 18:35, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

But shouldn't we then also add references when NATIVE pronunciations are being discussed? After all, using oneself as an linguistic informant, although common and useful, still would count as original research. Although I appreciate the request to give references, it means that there will be much less input here. We might get a superior quality product but there will be much, much less of it. Perhaps we should urge those with access to references to supply them for ideas they find sound but which, so far, lack external support? Interlingua 14:20, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

You're absolutely right. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't look for any sources, it means that it's that much easier to find sources because we can find stuff that discusses English pronunciation. There should be less input here if it's going to be original research or an inferior product. As I've said and read before, the phonology of a language is a huge determiner for how a non-native speaker of any language will speak. It's rare to find a scholarly source that explicitely says "speakers of language w have difficulty with phoneme /x/ of language /y/ and substitute it with phoneme /z/." AEuSoes1

Contributions to this article

Some users have dismissed this article as an unscientific piece based on personal impressions. To some extent I disagree. Many contributions may have been from native speakers of particular language who comment on what they themselves encounter whilst speaking English. Personally I encourage these contributions as self-awareness rather than possible condescension.

Others have charged this article as English-language-centric. It topic makes it essentially so.

Native speakers of particular languages commenting on what they themselves encounter whilst speaking English is unscientific and based on personal impressions. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a blog or a Usenet forum, and its articles are supposed to report on published research and to have the sources cited. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 06:38, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

It's not just that it's unscientific, it's that it can definitely be more scientific than it is. I'm under the impression that quite a bit of what we perceive as accents derive from transfer of phonology from a speaker's native language to English. So if the languages' phonologies are indicators, then researching them can help provide sourcing for the article. Statements such as "because language x doesn't have such and such phoneme" do just that. AEuSoes1 09:29, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

soft l: palatalized/dark l: non-palatalized -- ???

The section on Hebrew says:

Hebrew uses a palatalized ("soft") [l'], whereas English uses a non-palatalized ("hard") [l]

I guess the intended meaning is: Hebrew uses a normal ("soft") [l] where English uses a velarized ("hard") [ɫ].

I think I've come across this confusion earlier and I can intuitively comprehend it: From the point of view of the velarized [ɫ], the normal [l] may appear to be palatalized. Does anybody know whether this confusion is common? -- j. 'mach' wust | ‽ 10:51, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

In cleaning up the article, I figured whoever put that meant that when an English speaker uses "dark" (velarized) l (as an allophone of /l/) that a Hebrew speaker would still use a plain one. AEuSoes1 07:08, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Arabic

I don't know enough about Arabic to fix it, but it says that the postalveolar fricative and affricate are often confused. Confused how? I was under the impression that there was hardly a phonemic differentiation between the two in English. Should that be deleted or should we wait for an expert to come along and expand on it? And I'm also confused as to what "using rhoticity" means in the context of identifying an accent. AEuSoes1 09:29, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

Vote for Deletion

This article survived a Vote for Deletion. The discussion can be found here. -Splash 18:10, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Timing/stress

Can someone (I will try to do it in the future if I have time) add some information about the various accent features which arise due to differences in timing, i.e. syllable timing and stress timing? ~ Dpr 08:35, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Scottish

I would dispute that Scottish pronunciation of English should even be on this page. In practice virtually all Scots speak English as their first and only language, and as a dialect (Scots) it has been spoken for over a thousand years in Scotland, and survives in a form probably closer to Old English than the English spoken in England. To say that it is non-native is not even insulting, it is just incorrect.

You're right. Both the Irish and Scottish accents, while possibly distinguished because of their roots in second-language learning from their respective native celtic language, are characterized elsewhere in Wikipedia as native and we should be consistent. There is also a trend in India towards a similar situation since there are numerous native speakers of Indian English. I shall remove Irish and Scottish from this page. AEuSoes1 19:25, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

French

It seems as though there's the making of an edit conflict here over Agateller's edits in the French section. This is why I consider them to be currently innapropriate: 1) At the bottom of the page is a link where they have audio files of speakers from various languages, as well as IPA transcriptions and analyses for most speakers. I went to the French page [1] and that which I could not substantiate, I took out. 2) Your language indicates that French speakers always do the things you put in. I have specifically edited the article to incorporate the idea that all features explained are tendencies. 3) Some of the things you say don't make much sense:

a) What is "proper" English stress? This is about foreign speech in comparison to native speakers. Even native speakers may not have proper stress.

b) From my understanding of French, speakers can distinguish between nasal and oral vowels. Considering that foreign accents are mostly transfer from the native language why would they pronounce all English vowels as one or the other?

c) What do you mean that "articulation is distinct"?

d) Which diphthongs are monopthongized, what are they monophthongized to?

4) You may be 100% right in everything that you've put in. However, due to both Wikipedia's no original research policy and the fact that your claims contradict our current source, you have the burden of proof and until you provide a more legitimate source it must stay out. I do want to say, though, that I appreciate your input and don't want you to think of this as some sort of antagonism. Thank you very much. AEuSoes1 22:30, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

None of the entries in the article in question are usefully sourced. I don't see why French should be an exception to the rule. My edits don't qualify as original research—I read the definitions of this, and none of them matches.

The accent markers I describe are so well known to anyone familiar with French and English phonology that they do not require substantiation. They are a bit like saying that mercury is a liquid at room temperature: obvious to specialists, albeit perhaps less so to the lay person. Indeed, the entire article is of little use to someone who already knows these languages intimately, so I can only assume that the article serves those who must recognize, correct, or simulate an unfamilar accent (actors, ESL/EFL teachers, etc.), and my description is based on that assumption.

In response to your points:

1) I had to smile at your example of a source from the bottom of the page. Is that really the entire basis for the whole article?? I've used recordings from that site in ESL teaching, to give an example of native accents to students, but I'd hardly consider it an authority—in fact, it is exactly the type of “original research” that Wikipedia presumably eschews (it is unpublished original research, as far as I can tell). I didn't smile, though, at your removal of something that you don't understand. If you have to look at a page like that on the Web to “verify” what I'm writing, you're not qualified to edit it, and you should leave it alone. The alleged source at the bottom of the page is just a collection of a couple of recordings and transcriptions, and a few observations. Deriving a systematic description of foreign accent from that alone is quite a leap. Thus, as I see it, nothing on this page is sourced.

2) French speakers are indeed very consistent in making the mistakes I list; after all, they all speak the same language, and the phonetics are quite constant. I don't see why I must point out that they are tendencies, since only a robot would assume that these rules are cast in concrete. They are sufficiently consistent that they can be considered virtually universal. I have to constantly correct them all.

3a) "Proper" English stress is stress on the phonemically correct syllable in a word. For example, in the word annoy, stress falls on the second syllable, never the first. In many words, using the wrong stress changes the meaning of the word, or makes it impossible to recognize. English has a specific stress pattern for words that must be followed by speakers. French does not. Therefore French people tend to place equal stress on everything, or they put stress on the wrong syllables, making them very difficult to understand. Native speakers never use improper stress, because stress is phonemic (if they used the wrong stress, they wouldn't be understood).

3b) Many French speakers tend to pronounce all English vowels as nasal or oral because they are aware of the difference between the two (it's phonemic in French), and so they explicitly (but unconsciously) choose one or the other when speaking. Since the difference is unimportant in English, they tend to choose one or the other consistently, depending on the models they've encountered of native speech. After sufficient practice, they will eventually adopt the fluidity of English in making vowels nasal or oral (or something in between) depending on their position or on the regional accent being emulated. It's very common to hear a French person talking through his nose because his model spoke with a twang and he interpreted this to mean that all vowels must be nasal. Since the actual distribution of nasal and oral vowels is not phonemic in English and is rarely taught, Francophone students must figure it out on their own. Some do, some don't. Some have a good enough ear to repeat what they hear correctly without worrying about oral or nasal vowels. If they have had a variety of speakers as models, that helps.

3c) As every student of French knows, in French the articulators of the vocal tract are moved with precision from one segment to the next; there is no “sloppiness” or relaxation in an utterance. Only at the end of the utterance is this tension released. In English, tension is much more fluid, with stressed syllables being pronounced with precision, and unstressed syllables often being “eaten” in a haphazard way. This phenomenon is what causes English students of French to think that they hear an unstressed vowel at the end of French words like une, when in fact they are just hearing a release of tension, not a new segment. The articulatory tension of French causes Francophones to speak English in a way that sounds very deliberate and overcorrected at times; only with practice to they learn to slur things together in a more relaxed way as native Anglophones do.

3d) All diphthongs are converted to monophthongs by French speakers initially, although they quickly learn to pronounce the three phonemic diphthongs of English as either true diphthongs or as two consecutive vowels. The other diphthongs they tend to neglect. This doesn't prevent comprehension, because none of the others are phonemic, but it does give them an accent. In time they may come to pronounce most of the diphthongs, although the non-phonemic diphthongs tend to vary a great deal from one English pronunciation to another, and this discourages learning them unless students constantly hear exactly the same English accent. Even native speakers will drop the unnecessary diphthongs in some cases. Diphthongs are usually changed to their initial vowels; that is, Francophones will say [e] for diphthonged /eɪ̯/.

4) If you don't know whether I'm right or wrong, then your removal of my edits is completely unwarranted. If each of us removed everything in Wikipedia that we didn't understand, there would be nothing left. Your entire body of reference appears to be one guy at George Mason University; I draw my information from multiple sources, and just because I don't list them all exhaustively here doesn't mean that I don't know whereof I speak (it's difficult to remember them all after 30+ years). As I've said, to anyone familiar with the subject matter, my points are as obvious as saying that air is a gas, and it amazes me that anyone would question them (and nobody provides a source for the assertion that air is a gas).

Agateller 13:25, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

You make some excellent points and I would really enjoy seeing some of your other sources that you say you can’t list exhaustively. As you can tell, even a few sources would be a great improvement. However, our current source isn’t just one guy, it is a team of linguists funded by a university [2] with actual speakers for you to hear. It is indeed original research for that web page, but not for Wikipedia. When you are your own source, that is original research.

I’ve only been contributing to it for the past five months or so and before that people put in a lot of unsubstantiated crap that they noticed on their own. I’ve tried to verify most of it either with that web page or with each language’s phonology and common sense but there’s a lot of stuff. Some of it is awaiting verification.

Let’s just not assume what people will interpret when you say in an encyclopedia that something always happens. Just conform to the rest of the article.

Correct speech is for another article and although most of the time correct and native stress are the same, dialectical differences make words like vaginal, report, and frustrated different. Your point is accomplished without referring to “proper English.”

Unfortunately nasalizing all vowels (which I now see can make sense) and monopthongization are not substantiated in any source and I’ve never noticed it myself.

Actually, according to the NOR page, my removal of your edits is warranted:

It can be quite difficult for us to make any valid judgment as to whether a particular thing is true or not. It isn't appropriate for us to try to determine whether someone's novel theory of physics is valid; we aren't really equipped to do that. But what we can do is check whether or not it actually has been published in reputable journals or by reputable publishers.

I haven’t said that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’d be really surprised if after 30 years you didn’t. However, you need to provide sources to make the article better, not worse. If you see something else that looks blatantly unsubstantiated then take it out.

Air is a gas: [3]

Mercury is liquid at room temperature [4]

AEuSoes1 20:13, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Swedish: sh and oo

I wondered there was not told about possible pronunciation of /S/ by Swedishs as a [x\] and /u/ as a [}]. I've learned Swedish a bit but it is only my own ideas and I would like to know how it is in reality.

First. In literarry Swedish /S/ — as in common words so also in borrowings — can be pronounced as a [x\], voiceless palatal-velar fricative. In my native language (Ukrainian, Russian) the same can appear as a speech defect, and that who has got it can hardly pronounce a normal [S]. Very hardly. And in Swedish, where [x\] is a competent allophone of /S/, i think in could be totally impossible for some speakers to pronounce a [S]. Isn't it so?

Second. In normal Swedish all short letters U are pronounced as [}] (close central rounded vowel), even in the word automobil :) . So could they pronounce, for example, the word put as [p}t], no?

According to the Swedish phonology page, Swedish has /ʊ/ (the vowel in put) as a short vowel and /u/ as a long vowel. This is exactly the same as in English and the only reason a speaker would use the close central vowel for English's short u would be because the words with those sounds are generally spelled with o and /ʉ/ is spelled with u.

As for /ʃ/, there are a number of sounds in Swedish that could be transfered over such as [ɕ] and [ʂ] (both of which can be allophones of /ɧ/). Swedish speakers may have difficulty with the sh sound in English but according to the transcriptions at this website [5] speakers showed little difficulty with /ʃ/ and none of them pronounced it as [ɧ]. AEuSoes1 03:26, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

As to your first point, the Swedish people I have heard speaking have had no trouble with the English /ʃ/. As to using [ʉ] (according to the Swedish language article, it's actually [ɵ], but never mind) for /ʊ/, I have not heard a Swede do that. Swedish has a phoneme /ʊ/ which is similar-enough to the English value that it's not a problem, even though in Swedish it's spelt "o" (I think) ... consider that English often uses a short u for more open, unrounded vowel, AmE/RP /ʌ/, AusE /a/, so foreigners are probably not going to overgeneralise that way... And for the long vowel, Swedish /ʉː/ is almost the same as AusE /ʉː/ that I can't hear the diff... I've met more than a few Swedes, as I work at Ikea (some Swedes have surprised me and other Australians when they said they were not Australian, but Swedish). (posted after edit conflict) —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 03:39, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Ok, thank you, I think I've got it. :)

Russian

When did anyone pronounce the word that as lat? I think this is incorrect because it doesn't make sense and might be like one person in the entire word that does this. -Iopq 12:13, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I took it out. The only times that would happen would be when next to an /l/ in fast speech and in general phonetic mishaps. In both senses, Russian speakers are no more likely to do it than anyone else.AEuSoes1 22:00, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

A reverse version of this article

I would like to propose a reverse version this article, such as “Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages”. It will go something like

French

• No nasal or guttural sounds, i.e. un, goes like /ʌn/ rather then /ɶ/
• Mix-up of the pronunciation of “j” and “g”, gîte, should be pronounce /ʒit/ ends up being pronounce /gɪt/

159753 18:17, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Don't let me be the one to stop you. Although keep in mind that the different dialects of English will cause different negative transfers. AEuSoes1 22:16, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Suggested move to Wikibooks

An anon added a "move to Wikibooks" template, giving no reason. I thought simply removing it would be rude, so instead I'll ask if anyone supports such a move. I think it's a fine encyclopedia article. —Keenan Pepper 04:24, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

According to the "what is wikibooks" link, wikibooks includes instructional resources. There is a misconception that this page is either a) a guide to non-native english speakers in correcting their speech or b) a guide to native speakers in identifying foreign accents. This page is neither, it simply explains (in linguistic terms) foreign accents that people hear. AEuSoes1 19:43, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I totally agree, and I'm going to remove the template. —Keenan Pepper 00:01, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Hungarian

Voicing assimilation

The section about Hungarian seems to at least partially contradict the article about final devoicing.

Compare:

• Hungarian speakers are likely to exhibit regressive voicing assimilation, even across word boundaries. So, for instance, "truck driver" sounds more like "trugg driver" and "red house" like "ret house." (Non-native pronunciations of English#Hungarian)
• English does not have phonological final devoicing of the type that neutralizes phonemic contrasts; thus pairs like bad and bat are distinct in all major accents of English. Nevertheless voiced obstruents are devoiced to some extent in final position in English, especially when phrase-final or when followed by a voiceless consonant (for example, bad cat [bæd̥ kʰæt]). The most salient distinction between bad and bat is not the voicing of the final consonant… (Final devoicing: As I understand it, this means that even native speakers of English may exhibit some degree of regressive voicing assimilation /devoicing/ across word boundaries.)

You kind of miss the point. English speakers still contrast the two phonemic differences (albeit with vowel length and glottalization) while Hungarian speakers may not. AEuSoes1 11:44, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

The lack of glottal or glottalized stops as allophones of word final /t/ is already mentioned @ the 3rd bullet point. (And as I understand it, this feature is "responsible" for the loss of contrast – not voicing. Vowel length is very often phonemic in Hungarian, so this distinction might be retained, but I'm not a linguist, so I'd rather not speculate about this.) --194.152.154.2 18:49, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

• Also (English language learning and teaching#Pronunciation): 'Connected speech - Phonological processes such as assimilation, elision and epenthesis together with indistinct word boundaries can confuse learners when listening to natural spoken English, as well as making their speech sound too formal if they do not use them. For example, in RP eight beetles and three ants /eɪt biːtəlz ənd θriː ænts/ becomes [eɪdbiːtl̩zənθriːjæns].'

This article also states that there may be regressive voicing assimilation across word boundaries in RP (speech of native speakers) (eɪt -> eɪd). --194.152.154.2 18:49, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Dental fricatives

The dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ may be replaced by dental sibilents s̻ and z̻.

The voiced dental fricative is more often replaced by a (laminal dental) plosive (/d̪,/).

Quote: The most acceptable substitutes in the local cultural tradition are /θ/ -> 'sz', /ð/ -> 'd'. (Ádám Nádasdy: Background to English Pronunciation (Phonetics, Phonology, Spelling) – for students of English at Hungarian teacher training institutions; note that <sz> is a spelling for s̻ in Hungarian) I haven't read this book myself, but an English teacher(?) cited it in a debate about this question @ HuWP. --194.152.154.2 03:37, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, go ahead and make the appropriate changes to the article and then please add that book as a source. We need as many of those as possible. AEuSoes1 11:44, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Ok, but I think it's better to cite it as a reference, not a source for the whole section. (I'm not sure that it would support all other statements in this section, eg. maybe schwas are more often replaced by ø-s than œ-s as the latter is not a phoneme of Hungarian. But again, as a non-linguist I'd rather refrain from speculations.) --194.152.154.2 17:48, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Falling intonation

Most speakers have an absence of the English tonal variation. Falling intonation is used, making questions sound like statements.

I don't know who was the one who said this to you but I seriously doubt that the second sentence is true. In fact it's very easy to construct many example sentences in Hungarian that are identical in almost every aspect but the intonation.

Eg. "Tudod milyenek a szülei." [statement, falling intonation is used] (lit trnsl.: You know his parents.; meaning: You knowthat his parents are stupid.)

"Tudod milyenek a szülei?" [question, rising intonation is used] (lit trnsl.: Do you know his parents?; meaning: Do you know how stupid his parents are?) --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 19:41, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Length of the article

I just tagged this article as being too long. This talk page is also too long according to above. Voortle 01:19, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree. The talk page is very long in my opinion too. If the main article must be subdivided, my two ideas are split them up either alphabetically or by language group. Which would be better? 67.10.111.125 20:22, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I think alphabetically would be best. Voortle 02:44, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with subdividing it. We could probably combine similar languages into one group, like Ukrainian and Russian. Differences between the two can still be emphasized in the same way as dialectal differences within a language are. AEuSoes1 20:49, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

French Canadian

The common Canadian French dialect of joile can be so far removed from "proper" French, that the two become mutually unintelligible and can almost be considered different languages. As such, I believe that French Canadian deserves it's own distinct subsection under French.

There are roughly 7 million native French Canadians sandwiched between 300 million English North Americans. This has led to some uniquely Québecois errors in speaking English. The article currently mentions one of those differences, but there are others. In fact, French Canadian (Québecois) pronunciation of English is often starkly different than what you will hear in France. I am not qualified to make any changes however. If anyone is, feel free. :) --70.82.50.67 08:36, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Based On

It seems most of these are based on English speaking people researching other languages and looking for sounds they lack and then assuming the speakers are unable to pronounce those sounds. These should be based off of real people, not a "Words and Phrases Book".

That method actually makes sense. If a speaker lacks a sound in their speech, they're going to have difficulty with it. There's more to it than that, but it's definitely a good start. AEuSoes1 21:09, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

No It's based on ignorance and people thinking they know other people's languages simply because they read a few things in a "Berlitz Words and Phrases" book. It would be like saying "All English speakers pronounce ö as just o, because English does not have that letter".

Your analagy doesn't really work because that is a statement linking orthographic difficulties with phonetic ones. Where does the article say that all speakers of language X do/don't do Y? I've taken great care to make sure the wording indicates tendencies.

There are some issues with sourcing, and if that's your beef it's understandable. But a good deal of what is outlined in the article is backed up by the relating phonology pages as far as what sounds do/do not exist in a language. I do believe the method that you criticize (that of looking at a language's phonology as a method of how its speakers will deal with another language) is actually backed up by scholarly sources. Jeffers and Lehiste is one such source. AEuSoes1 02:17, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Why isn't there any articles bad mouthing how horribly English speakers pronounce words in other languages? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.227.5.186 (talk • contribs)

Actually, there is an article about this: Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 18:14, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Well I'm done complaining.