Non-native pronunciations of English

Overview

Examples from Indo-European languages">Indo-European">Indo-European languages

[Germanic languages]

Dutch

• Speakers have difficulty with dental fricatives, often pronouncing as or . 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 is replaced by such 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 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 the dark l does not 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.

• Speakers confuse between and, so that man and men are both pronounced as the latter.
• Speakers confuse between and, so that pool and pull are both pronounced with. Some advanced speakers may employ a glide .
• /iː/ is pronounced closer, tenser, and sometimes shorter than usual. Some advanced speakers might over-compensate for the length with a diphthong like .
• 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 .
• /əʊ/ is replaced by . More advanced speakers might use the Dutch diphthong .
• /aɪ/ tends to be overly long before fortis consonants, giving the impression of a following lenis consonant.

German

• German has a smaller pitch range, less consonant cluster reduction, and less vowel reduction.

• Speakers may not velarize in coda positions as most native speakers do.
• German features terminal devoicing, which is often carried over to English
• German features neither nor, and both are often realised as either /s/ or /f/
• German speakers tend to realise as 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.
• After German speakers master the pronunciation of, some of them hypercorrect to incorrectly pronounce the phoneme in English as without realizing it.

[Hellenic languages]

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.

• The English vowels and are conflated.

[Romance languages]

Catalan

• Devoicing of final consonants: to .
• Confusion of, usually realized as .
• Rhotic pronunciation, with pronounced as a trill or a flap.
• Difficulties with word-initial clusters involving, where an epenthetic e is usually added.
• Simplification of some word consonant clusters.

• Vowel length confusions.
• Confusion of, usually realized as
• Confusion of, usually realized as.
• Confusion of, usually realized as.
• Confusion of, usually realized as or.

• Narrower pitch range, with emphasis marked with extra length instead of extra pitch variation.
• Problems with variable stress.
• Problems with contrastive stress.

Italian

• Tendency to realise as or as because Italian is an allophone of before velar stops.
• 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.
• 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.

• and are pronounced ;
• and are pronounced ;
• ,, and are pronounced ;
• and are pronounced ;
• 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.
• Schwa does not exist in Italian; speakers tend to give the written vowel its full pronunciation, e.g. lemon, television, parrot, intelligent, water, sugar.

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 . 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 and..

Portuguese

• 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 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, and use of within the IPA space, 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.

• Difficulty with dental fricatives and. These may be instead fronted, stopped or hissed.
• Speakers may pronounce word-initial r as a guttural r 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 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.
• The insertion of to break up consonant clusters.
• Palatalization due to epenthetic, so that night sounds slightly like nightch and light sounds like lightchie.
• Loss of unstressed, syllable-final to palatalization, so that city sounds slightly like sitch.
• 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 confused with each other. Spelling pronunciations are also possible, in which all words that historically contain schwas in their orthography are pronounced as /z/, even when the usual pronunciation would be /s/.
• 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. so that I love you is pronounced. These semivowels may also be epenthetically inserted between vowels of very dissimilar qualities.
• With the exception of 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.

Romanian

• Romanian doesn't have and. They are often pronounced as and, respectively.
• The letter r is often pronounced as the hard rhotic, as that is the only sound it makes in Romanian, even though a native English speaker would pronounce it as ~.
• The silent p before a consonant is usually pronounced.

• and are often pronounced .
• Romanian doesn't have the and sounds. They are often pronounced as. However, speakers in some parts of Transylvania are usually familiar with Hungarian before learning English, and Hungarian does have, as such, they pronounce them as.
• Romanian doesn't have the sound. It is often pronounced as.
• and are often pronounced .

Spanish

• Since Spanish does not make voicing contrasts between its fricatives, 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, Spanish allows only five word-final consonants:,,,, and ; speakers may omit word-final consonants other than these, or alter them.
• In Spanish, must immediately precede or follow a vowel; often a word beginning with + consonant will acquire an epenthetic vowel to make stomp pronounced rather than.
• In Spanish, the phoneme exists only in 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 common realizations include, deletion with nasalization of the preceding vowel, or.
• Devoicing of final consonants.

• Vowel length confusions.
• Confusion of, usually realized as
• Confusion of, usually realized as.
• Confusion of, usually realized as.
• Confusion of, usually realized as.

• Narrower pitch range, with emphasis marked with extra length instead of extra pitch variation.
• Problems with variable stress.
• Problems with contrastive stress.

[Slavic languages] (part of the Balto-Slavic branch">Balto-Slavic languages">Balto-Slavic branch)

Czech

• Final devoicing of voiced consonants, 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.
• Czech is alveolar trill. There is a tendency to pronounce the trill in English and in all positions where is written.
• Final -er pronounced as syllabic alveolar trill . Stressed tends to be realized as .
• Tendency to realize both and as, since does not exist in Czech.
• Tendency to pronounce the initial cluster as .
• 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.
• Tendency not to aspirate the stops, since these stop consonants are not aspirated in Czech.
• Tendency to realise as or, because Czech is an allophone of before velar stops.

• 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 or .

• 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.

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, 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.
• Russian exhibits final-obstruent devoicing, which may also be used by speakers in English.
• Since there are no dental fricatives in Russian, speakers may pronounce them respectively as or or and as or or.
• English is typically realised as a trill, 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 pronounced as its closest Russian equivalent,.
• The postalveolar fricatives and may be realised as their closest Russian equivalents, and.
• The consonant cluster may be realised as an affricate,.
• The "clear" alveolar may be realised as Russian, sounding closer to English velarised .
• Consonants written twice in English may be geminated by speakers.

• Russian speakers may have difficulty distinguishing and, and, and and ; similarly, speakers' pronunciation of long vowels may sound more like their close counterpart

Examples from non-Indo-European languages

[Sino-Tibetan]

Cantonese

• tends to be, so this is,

• /ə/ tends to be, so whether is.
• There is less vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, and some variation in the placement of stress. For example, chocolate may be pronounced instead of.

[Uralic]

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 instead of

Austronesian">Austronesian languages">Austronesian

Indonesian

• Merger of and into and.
• Final-obstruent devoicing.

• Difficulty with English vowels, including lack of vowel length.
• * →
• * →
• Common occurrence of unusual spelling pronunciations.

[Japonic]

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.

• Tendency to realize syllables containing unstressed central vowel /ə/ with a vowel based on the written form
• Tendency to insert a vowel, typically /o/ or /ɯ/, after consonants other than moraic nasal /ɴ/, as Japanese lacks syllable-final consonants.

• Tendency to reanalyze English words according to moraic timing and/or pitch accent, leading to unnatural stress/timing

Austroasiatic">Austroasiatic languages">Austroasiatic

Vietnamese

• 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 and confuse the following phonemes, which in some cases may depend on where in Vietnam they are originally from:
• * with,.
• * with,.
• * with .
• * with.
• * with.
• * with or.
• * with by northern Vietnamese.
• * with,, or by northern Vietnamese.
• * with by southern Vietnamese.

• Speakers often have difficulty with and confuse the following phonemes, which in some cases may depend on where in Vietnam they are originally from:
• * with.
• * with or.
• * with.

• Vietnamese being a tonal language, speakers might try to apply the Vietnamese tonal system or use a mid tone with English words. However, they produce a high tone when the closed syllable is followed by /p, t, k/. They may also associate tones with the intonational pattern of a sentence and become confused by inflectional changes.

[Afroasiatic] (Semitic branch">Semitic languages">Semitic branch is only listed)

Arabic

• Speakers tend to speak with a rhotic accent and pronounce as or.
• There is struggle in pronouncing alone in its final position; the “ing” syllable. It is often immediately related to the sound, like in: "waiting" instead of and "something" instead of.
• A study conducted with 45 subjects from Egypt, Libya and Saudi Arabia found that speakers had difficulty in pronouncing some English consonants such as,,, dark.

• 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.

Hebrew

• The dental fricatives and are often mispronounced.
• Hebrew speakers may confuse and.

• The lack of discrimination in Hebrew between tense and lax vowels makes correctly pronouncing English words such as hit/''heat and cook/kook'' difficult.

• In Hebrew, word stress is usually on the last 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.