Intelligibility and Comprehensibility of the Filipino English Accent to Hong Kong English Speakers

Chen Hsueh Chu,Li Hui Ping

doi:10.17576/3l-2019-2501-02

Abstract

Intercultural communication between Hong Kong people and Filipinos is common and crucial in Hong Kong as Filipinos are the largest non-local ethnic group, and Filipino domestic helpers play a significant role in households and childcare. This study investigated the phonological patterns of Filipino English and explored the intelligibility and comprehensibility of the English spoken by Filipino domestic helpers to student teachers of English in Hong Kong. By analysing the speech produced by three Filipino English speakers, features of Filipino-accented English were identified. Moreover, by conducting listening-dictation tasks, it was found that the listeners considered 30% and 80.6% of the isolated words and keywords in a passage respectively to be intelligible, and 74.7% of the speech produced by Filipino English speakers was comprehensible. The major types of features of the Filipino English accent, which are also found to be factors which contribute to problems in intelligibility and comprehensibility such as consonant substitutions, deletion of consonants and consonant clusters, no distinction between long and short vowels, replacement of vowels, and shifting of word stress, are discussed in detail in this research paper along with the pedagogical and social implications. Keywords: World Englishes; intercultural communication; pronunciation teaching; Filipino English; foreign accent

Highlights

In the multicultural society of Hong Kong, Filipino is the largest non-local ethnic group, making up 2.5% of Hong Kong’s total population in 2016 (Census & Statistics Department 2017)
The phonological analysis of the recordings of the three Filipino English speakers was conducted in terms of consonants, vowels, and word stress
The substitution of fricatives by plosives at word-medial positions aligned with the results of previous research, where the voiced fricative was often substituted by the voiced plosive, as in /ð/ to /d/ and /v/ to /b/, while the voiceless fricative was often substituted by the voiceless plosive, as in /θ/ to /t/ and /f/ to /p/ (Dayag 2007, Tayao, 2004), but the pattern was slightly different in word-initial and word-final positions, where voiced and voiceless fricatives were substituted by voiced plosives in some words and voiceless plosives in others

Summary

Introduction

Most Filipinos in Hong Kong work as domestic helpers in households due to the large demand for caretakers in Hong Kong families because it is common for parents in Hong Kong to be so occupied by work that they have limited time to take care of their children. It is found that parents prefer domestic helpers over child care centres to take care of their children when family members are unavailable to do so (Tam 2001, Yeoh & Huang 1999). According to Tse et al.’s (2009) study, English is the medium of communication between 64% of 4,000 primary four children and their foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong, indicating that English is crucial for mutual understanding and communication between most Hong Kong families and their domestic workers. In order to understand the effectiveness of communication between Hong Kong and Filipino English speakers, we explore the intelligibility and comprehensibility of

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Conclusion