Abstract
The paper is about the acoustic effect of Urdu phonological rules on Pakistani Urdu speakers' English speech. The objective of the study is to discuss the phenomenon of multiple pronunciations of an English word that has the same spellings, meaning, and part of speech but different pronunciations in the English speech of Urdu speakers. Sometimes these alternative pronunciations are considered mispronunciation rather than multiple pronunciations. The primary purpose of this study is to make a boundary-line between mispronunciations and multiple pronunciations of English vocabulary. Thus, an acoustic analysis of Urdu speakers' English speech has been done by collecting speech data of 30 Urdu speakers from the Public sector universities of Pakistan. Consequently, this paper caters to language-dependent variations of Urdu. This paper only deals with three phonological rules, i.e., segment alternation, ellipsis, epenthesis, which become the cause for re-syllabification of English words. These three foci of research have been selected because the data analysis has confirmed that the 'multiple pronunciation' is mainly occurred due to these three elements. These three categories cover several sub-categories that cover many instances in the data analysis. The data also confirms that phonological variations occur due to stress shifting in Urdu speakers' English speech in Pakistan.
Highlights
In Pakistan, Urdu is the national and official language, but it has 100 million speakers worldwide
This paper only deals with three phonological rules, i.e., segment alternation, ellipsis, epenthesis, which become the cause for re-syllabification of English words
The speech analysis results have confirmed that Pakistani Urdu speakers have articulated English speech with multiple pronunciations in different contexts and instances
Summary
In Pakistan, Urdu is the national and official language, but it has 100 million speakers worldwide. They have multiple pronunciations and accents (Farooq, 2015), which become the reason for phonological variations and rules (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016). The hypothesis of this research is; Urdu phonological rules directly influence the English pronunciation of Pakistani Urdu speakers. The reason is the observation of alternative pronunciation of English vocabulary, but more interestingly are intelligible among L2 English speakers in Pakistan. A word ‘beautiful’ [bjutifʊl] has two more alternative pronunciations; /bəju:tifʊl/ and /bɪjutiful/; secondly the word ‘exact’ (in British English /ɪɡzəkt/)
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