The wonder of pronunciation

Have you ever tried to learn a foreign language and found that it has sounds that are totally foreign, sounds that are hard to hear, let alone pronounce? I’m pretty good at it but even after four years of encouragement from my Ukrainian students, my attempts to pronounce their letter и (the first vowel sound of their capital Kyiv - Київ) prompt smiles and occasional laughter.

Correctly pronouncing even a single sound takes amazing coordination of hearing, muscles in the mouth and face, and breath control. When we put a few sounds together in words and phrases, we have to add accurate rhythm and stress to the flow of sound.

It’s an amazing process that we take it all for granted except when somebody suffers an impairment, such as a stroke.

We have a clear mental model of what it all “should” sound like - at least in our native language - and we detect the slightest variance from that model. We quickly posit a reason for that variance. If we think it’s a regional accent, a foreign accent or a speech impairment or a neurological impairment, we may experience feelings of sympathy or antipathy. If we think the variance is due to affectation or fashion, we may make moral judgments.

Our feelings and judgments arise unbidden. In addition to accepting that we experience those feelings, whatever they may be, I think it’s worth making the effort to become unjudgmentally curious about the elements of variance that we are hearing.

Items that have recently stirred my curiosity:

American English has many distinctive features that we can all recognise, but how about the American pronunciation of with (rhyming with pith)? British with ends in a voiced sound [ð] — the same sound as the th in this or the — while many Americans use the unvoiced [θ], the sound in thin or pith.

Irish people often pronounce the t sound with a breath after it. It’s callend an aspirated dental stop — the tongue tip touches the upper teeth rather than the alveolar ridge, and there's often the slightest puff of air.

Part of what makes Welsh accents distinctive is the rhythm, lingering briefly on the penultimate syllable of a phrase.