All Questions
12 questions
2
votes
2
answers
543
views
Guttural pronunciation of {h} in American English
I'm not a native speaker. I've noticed that some Americans pronounce {h} as a guttural sound sometimes. Is this a documented feature of American English?
Examples:
https://youtu.be/j2I9LpDF708?t=7 (...
- 23
0
votes
1
answer
117
views
Do stressed (in e.g. English) or pitched (in e.g. Japanese) phones contribute to different phonemes?
In proper tonal languages such as cantonese or mandarin, the phones a phoneme comprises of share the same tone. In other words, mā (in pinyin) and má are clearly different phonemes.
If I were to look ...
- 111
3
votes
1
answer
78
views
Looking for Spanish varieties/accents
This might not be the right place to ask this, and if so, I apologize. I'm a student conducting research on Spanish varieties and I am wondering if anyone knows where I could find short texts read by ...
0
votes
1
answer
1k
views
What type of stress does French have
So I know that there are on the one hand pitch-accent languages (like South-Slavic languages, Greek, Norwegian, etc.) where the accentuated syllable is indicated by a particular pitch contour/tone ...
- 939
4
votes
1
answer
694
views
Which dialect/accent of English has the most/least sounds?
My accent is from New York City, yet I wonder which area has the most or least sounds in their phonemic inventory. While one may have the most vowels and another the most consonants, I would like to ...
- 189
3
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Why do Americans and Canadians pronounce "t" with flap [ɾ] in unstressed syllables in English?
Most Americans and Canadians pronounce "t" with flap [ɾ] in unstressed syllables. Why?
- 121
5
votes
2
answers
317
views
Conflation of language dialects and phonology
The main idea behind this questions is that I have some difficulty to accept that a certain language can be a dialect of another one by simply basing that argument on the similarity of the vocabulary ...
- 152
3
votes
3
answers
874
views
Minimal Pairs Highlighting the Difference between American and British English
Does anyone have a list of minimal pairs, highlighting the difference between American and British English?
Thanks.
- 31
1
vote
1
answer
413
views
Best phonetic/ phonology resource for learning accents?
I'm a non-native English speaker at a California university absolutely fascinated by the variety of English accents I encounter in my day-to-day life. I have a co-worker with a Singaporean accent, for ...
- 261
5
votes
2
answers
452
views
What characterises Hebrew spoken by native English speakers?
I was watching episode 8 of Srugim's third season and noticed, beginning at approximately 19:50 (at least in the Hulu upload), this very minor character whose Hebrew sounded weirdly "off" to me. From ...
user9340
4
votes
1
answer
334
views
Why do French/German speakers round [ð] to /z/ while Italian/Hebrew speakers round it to /d/?
More generally, what factors determine which phoneme a non-phonemic foreign sound gets rounded to in a specific language when there are multiple possibilities available? Is the choice always ...
- 1,162
10
votes
3
answers
1k
views
Distinguishing dialects objectively: lexical sets in non-English settings
The concept of lexical set is a useful technique for differentiating accents or dialects within a language. A lexical set is a set of all words/syllables that are pronounced with the same vowel. These ...
- 4,495