The emergence of systematicity in the English pronunciations of two Cantonese-speaking adults in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper describes and analyses the phenomenon of consonant cluster simplification in the English of two native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. We show that this process is systematic in that it targets the alveolar plosives and removes them when they are members of a coda consonant cluster in spite of the fact that the details of the simplification may vary from subject to subject. We compare this process to a seemingly similar cluster simplification in native varieties of English and show that they differ in two key respects. Our study provides evidence of a systematic morphophonemic alternation in the English of L1 Cantonese speakers, confirming the observation in a number of sociolinguistic studies that this process is a linguistic feature of the English of L1 Cantonese speakers.