The role of vowel quality in ELF misunderstandings

Abstract

Abstract Misunderstandings are natural occurrences in conversation. Though they are the exception to the norm, and furthermore they do not necessarily result in communication breakdown, they do sometimes occur, and it is important to find out what causes them. Deterding (2013. Misunderstandings in English as a lingua franca: An analysis of ELF interactions in South-East Asia. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.) investigates misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in data from the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and discusses the role of phonological, lexical and grammatical features in causing them to occur. He reports that over 86 % of the tokens of misunderstandings in his corpus involve pronunciation. The current paper analyses this data further, specifically to determine the role of vowels, as Jenkins (2000. The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) has suggested that vowel quality is not important in English as a Lingua Franca, so she excludes vowel quality from the Lingua Franca Core, the set of pronunciation features that she suggests are important for maintaining intelligibility in an international setting. In fact, a total of over half the tokens of misunderstanding listed in Deterding’s Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca involve the quality of vowels, though in many cases this appears to be a minor factor. The current paper analyses these 98 tokens involving vowel quality in detail, to find out if some shifts in vowel quality are more important than others, and to investigate if vowel quality really is unimportant for intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca. It was found that vowel quality rarely causes a problem, and only in one token, in which the speaker was making a joke, is vowel quality the main factor causing the misunderstanding.