Phonemes in MTI/Fatal errors

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nitesh142857

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Hi,

I am trying to understand Mother-tongue influence, and would like to know if there is a special class of Phonemes which constitute a mother-tongue influence. Also can MTI be classified as only vowel or consonant errors.

Thanks,
Nitesh
 

Alex Thompson

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probus

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No to both questions.

Mother-tongue influence is the way that the mother tongue of non-native speakers tends to affect their pronunciation of a second language. We native speakers of English suffer from MTI when we try to learn other languages, just as you do when learning English. Three examples:

1. Native speakers of English often mispronounce Spanish words that start with the letter V. They give it its phonetic value in English, not realizing that in Spanish an initial V is pronounced like B in English. It's not Vera Cruz it's Bera Crus.

2. Native speakers of English often mispronounce French words like cru and connu because that u sound does not exist in English. In the same vein, the highly plosive consonants that occur in Hindi do not exist in English, which tends to make our Hindi sound funny.

3. There are elements of mother-tongue influence that do not involve phonemes. For example French does not have much in the way of stressed and unstressed syllables. Even more extreme is Danish which is always spoken in flat monotone. MTI makes it hard for native English speakers to learn these pronunciations.
 
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