ESSAY:

In an article published by the Oxford Royale Academy on June 17, 20141, it was stated that
English is one of the hardest languages to learn. In it, the author presented some of the most
frequent complaints by English learners in general. Important aspects of those difficulties
encountered include word order, pronunciation, word formation, homophones, phrasal
verbs and the existence of regional dialects, amongst others. After reading this and based
on the subjects studied in our course of English phonology and Morphology at the University
of El Salvador (UES), we came across the following question:
“Is there a phonological explanation for the fact that Salvadoran English Speakers /
Learners have a hard time pronouncing vowels followed by the /-r/ such as [kolchor] for
culture, [bir / ber] for bird, or [neibor] for neighbor? “
Before analyzing the previous question or drawing any conclusions, we shall look at some
examples of problems that Salvadoran English learners usually encounter while pronouncing
English words, more precisely the ones related to the English phoneme /r/: 2
1) ‘answer’ is often realized as [answɛr] or even [answɔr] instead of /ˈɑːnsə/ or /ˈɑːnsɜːr/
2) ‘sir’ is pronounced [sɛɾ] (with a velar flap sound) or [sɔr] instead of /sɜr/
3) ‘word’ and ‘work’ are pronounced [wɔɾd] [wɔɾk], respectively. And…
4) ‘treasure’ and ‘disturb’ are often times realized as [treʃɔɾ] and [disˈtʊɾb].

The previous examples show us that whenever a vowel preceding an /r/ phoneme occurs,
Salvadorans tend to have issues pronouncing English vowels correctly. Of course, this
difficulties are not exclusive of Salvadoran speakers or learners, but we decided to analize
this is the context in which we live and in which we ourselves learned the language. Now, in
order to explain the reasons of these of this linguistic phenomenon, we shall start with the
assumption that the explanation is not only phonological but also phonetical. Why so? Let’s
see.
First, we can notice that, in the examples above, Salvadorans have issues making an
appropriate vowel transfer when pronouncing English words because of the differences in
their vowel systems. For instance, Spanish shows a significant aspect that distinguishes it
from English and other European languages, that is, its almost direct correspondence between
spelling and pronunciation.3 Spanish words are thus most times pronounced as it is written
and counts only five vowels (‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ and ‘u’ ) and five corresponding phonemes
assigned to those (namely /a/, /e/ /i/, /o/ and /u/), whereas English not only has a wider
spectrum of vowels distinguished by length, shape, lip position, etc., but also it shows
numerous inconsistencies between spelling and realization of those phonemes. In addition to
that, both latin american spanish and castillian spanish lack of the socalled open-mid vowels
/e/ and /o/ and close-mid vowels and /ɛ/ , /ɔ/ as they were presented in the cardinal vowel
system suggested by the IPA and presented by Peter Roach in Chapter 2, discussed in class4.
Moreover, that lack of open and close mid vowels provides Spanish with a distinctive feature,
which is that its vowels are medial regarding tongue height. That has been marked in IPA
with the distinctive diacritical signs (/e̞/ o /ɛ̝/ /o̞/ u /ɔ̝/ ) and Spanish also lacks the schwa
ə or its longer equivalent long vowel ɜː, which causes a lot of troubles to Spanish native
speakers, who end up replacing VC combinations containing X+r to their closest heard
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Spanish counterpart, that is either [-ɛɾ] or [-ɔr] in words like ‘sir’ in (2) , [-uɾ] in ‘disturb’ (4)
or even [-ɔɾ] in ‘word’ and ‘work’ (3).

Figure 1 for a comparison of English vs. Spanish vowels.

As a second phonetical explanation for that problem, one could also observe that not only
vowels cause difficulties to Salvadorans, but also the pronunciation of the /r/ phoneme, that
is in many cases produced out of simplicity as the Spanish /r/, whose equivalent would be
the alveolar flap / ɾ / occurring more commonly in Northamerican, Scottish and other
dialects of English, being rothic, in words like ‘bottle’ pronounced [ˈbɛɾər ]. We must not
forget, however, that Spanish does possess two different —some of its dialects even 3 or
more— allophones of it, depending on their consonantal distribution. For instance initial /r/
or double “rr” in spelling is represented by [r] and final position is represented by [ɾ].
5) ‘rata’ is pronounced [‘rata] , meaning ‘rat’.
6) ‘perro’ is pronounced approximately like [‘pɛrrɔ], meaning ‘dog’.
7) ‘pero’ is pronounced [‘pɛɾɔ], which is the conjunction ‘but’.

Many Salvadoran will even tend to pronounce English /r/ phoneme as their mother tongue
counterpart rolled /r/ as in examples (5) and (6). Surprisingly, the /r/ sound, which in
articulatory phonetics is classified in English Phonetics as an approximant, while in
spanish is called simply ‘vibrant’ due to its manner of articulation, which is produced by
placing the tip of the tongue and its blade behind the upper teeth.Then the lateral edges of the
tongue touch the internal side of molars obstructing the lateral airflow. This maximum air
compression pushes the tongue outside, which rapidly touches the alveolar region again to
be pushed in the same manner. This process goes on many times in a very short timeframe6,
causing a somewhat violent vibration and the sensation of a strong sound, comparable as of
the Russian /r/.

Finally, we can say that the difficulties in pronunciation of ‘X+/r/’ combinations for
Salvadoran speakers have a morphological reason in the sense that those problems are bound
to the concept of vowel and consonant distribuition. We have seen that vowels followed by
the /r/ tend to be pronounced similarly to its closest corresponding Spanish vowel. This,
however, does not happen when we have the combination ‘/r/ + X’. For example a
Salvadoran will read / pronounce ‘rude’ as [ru:d], ‘red’ as [rɛd] or rim as [rim]. In short
we can state that learners will most probably have troubles with vowels followed by /r/,
meaning because of their distribution, since, as we saw and learned throughout this course,
pronunciation depends generally on the phonetic environment it occurs. And this is no
wonder for those realisations are very similar to Spanish and therefore ‘overgeneralised’ or
easily predicted.

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Conclusion and a piece of advice
As a conclusion, we studied the difficulties that many Salvadoran speakers come across to
when learning English. We compared both Spanish and English vowel systems and
understood that there are phonetic aspects involved in the production of those groups of
vowels; that Spanish has a very definite but more limited vowel system when compared to
English. We proved that, because of the non existence of schwa ə, Spanish speaking
Salvadorans tend to simplify by making use of the closest equivalent vowel, which may
sometimes interfere semantically in what is being intended to be said or communicated.
Furthermore, we learned about some distinguishing aspects between the English phoneme
/r/, approximant and /r/ and /ɾ/ vibrants of Spanish. Not less important is the discovery
that phonological aspects as consonantal and vowel distribution affect also pronunciation
of words in English. We noticed too, that some of those issues in pronunciation are also
caused by the non-direct correspondence of spelling and pronunciation in English, which
tends to be, for language historical reasons, more complex than Spanish.
As a manner of recommendation, we encourage anyone having issues with such
combinations to make use of online ressources when doubts arouse. There are nowadays
many websites where not only pronunciation of specific words can be found, but also its
phonetical transcription, often accompanied of an MP3-File that can appear with its british
counterpart, like in the case of Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. Also the Cambridge
Online Dictionary offers the british version of words, both are well known and provide with
valuable insights regarding to lexical remarks or semantic nuances. It is important to develop
an action plan that is realistic and that is carried out on a regular basis, to gradually see our
progress in pronunciation. We firmly believe that the more often we aim for self
improvement, the better professionals we shall be, but more important, the better we shall be
able to communicate in this global, no doubt, challenging world.

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Bibliography used for the research
Some Ressources consulted were:
1. https://www.oxford-royale.co.uk/articles/learning-english-hard.html
2. https://tophonetics.com/
3. http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/PhonUnits/vowels.html
4. Roach, Peter, English Phonetics and Phonology, A practical course, 4.ed. 2004,
London. Chapters 2, 3 and on.
5. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcripci%C3%B3n_fon%C3%A9tica_del_espa%C
3%B1ol_con_el_AFI#Vocales
6. http://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/index.html#english