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from what they are in another, the same system of consonants will be found among virtually all
educated native speakers of English worldwide. Millions of unsophisticated speakers in eg London,
New York and Dublin have no / / or / / but this is strictly limited to low-prestige varieties of
English. On the other hand, inhabitants of the Celtic countries (ie Wales, Scotland and Ireland)
usually employ a [x], ie the same sound as a Spanish jota, in various regional names and terms.
Compare the Scottish English version of loch which ends with /x/. The usual GB form of the word
has as final consonant /k/.
2. The English inventory of consonants consists of 24 units (phonemes) which can usefully be
considered in three sets of eight items each. Two of the sets are very closely parallel because each
item in them differs from its corresponding member of the other set essentially only by whether its
articulation is (ordinarily relatively) sharp or soft. The remaining set of eight is more miscellaneous.
Sharp
Soft
Other
m
n
l
r[]
j
w
h
3. Some eight of these, viz / f, , s, , m, n, j / and /w/, correspond very closely to phonemes
occurring in the Spanish language. Others can be said not to exist in Spanish, at least in Castilian,
eg // and //; but as regards most of the remaining items, the contrasts between the two languages
are more complex.
4. The 20 Spanish consonantal phonemes include five types /x, , , rr/ and // not found in English.
Voiceless
Voiced
Other
m
n
rr
j
w
5. English /p/ differs from Spanish /p/ in quality chiefly by virtue of being subject to what is known
as aspiration ie it is always followed by a marked short burst of air (of /h/ quality) whenever it
begins a stressed syllable and sometimes less noticeably by a slighter puff in other situations. This is
important because it is what keeps /p/ & /b/, /t/ & /d/ and k/ & /g/ apart in English. Hearing the
Spanish word pacharan for the first time I wrote it as bacharanwhich is a fact that should warn
students that if they fail to aspirate stressed syllable-initial /p/ etc, a native English speaker will be
very likely to interpret that attempt at /p/ etc as the correspnding soft (voiced) consonant. By
contrast, it is mainly because Spanish /b/ has voicing (accompanying vibration of the vocal folds)
that it is distinct from Spanish /p/. The same pattern of aspiration versus non aspiration applies less
obviously to English / / and / /, the sounds respectively at the beginnings and the ends ofchurch
and judge.
6. The letters b and v in English ordinarily represent quite distinct sound units of the language. On
the contrary, for Spanish they are merely variant spellings for the same phoneme. In English /b/ is
regularly a bilabial plosive while /v/ is typically a labiodental fricative. The Spanish phoneme on
the other hand is variously a bilabial plosive or fricative or approximant sound.
7. The approximant allophone (variant) of the Spanish b/v sound differs from English /w/ only by
lacking lip-rounding. Such a sound may be heard from English speakers when, as is quite often the
case in rather hurried articulation, the wordable is pronounced as [el]. The utterance-initial
plosive sometimes substituted by Spanish speakers for an English fricative (or approximant or
rarely plosive) /v/ can disguise a word eg make the word very sound like beret.
8. The English consonant // corresponds in sound quality exactly to the Spanish d at the ends of
words or within them but adjacent to an /n/ or /l/ the Spanish phoneme takes a plosive form like
English /d/. So Spanish speakers have to be particularly careful not to substitute /d/ for initial th when saying eg in that, on the, when they, although, tell them etc.
9. The sound quality of the English /s/ as attempted by some Spanish speakers is rather too similar
to the English sh sound //. Such a value is very occasionally heard as an idiosyncrasy from some
British and some American speakers (eg the American James Stewart and the British Lord William
Deedes) but it should certainly be avoided by Spanish-speaking learners.
10. The buzzing sound quality of the English /z/ is only heard in (Castilian) Spanish as an
allophonic variant value of the letter s in a word like mismo. It sounds totally abnormal to produce a
/z/ instead of an /s/ at the beginnings of English words like slow, small, snap etc.
11. English // as in she, / / as in pleasure and // as in judge do not have equivalent phonemes in
(Castilian) Spanish so care must be taken not to confuse //and // as in washing versuswatching etc
and not to substitute // for any of them.
12. All four of / , , /and / / are markedly rounded in English: Spanish speakers occasionally
fail to make them rounded enough especially in palatal contexts eg as in cheap, cheeseand chin.
13. The English type of aspirate /h/ as in how does not occur in Castilian. English /h/ is normally a
very weak sound and any attempt at it which resembles the Spanish speakers jota [x] will be likely
to sound very harsh, as would any use of the typical strongly fricative Spanish value of non-initial g
[ ].
14. English / m /as in mum corresponds exactly to Spanish /m/. However, although all three of the
English nasal phonemes /m, n, / may end syllables, only /n/ of the three Spanish nasal
phonemes /m, n, / may do so. This is reflected in the fact that Biblical names such as Abraham,
Adam, Bethlehem (Spanish Beln), Jerusalemetc end in n in their Spanish forms. It is also no doubt
responsible for the to-English-ears-alarming way in which many Spanish speakers (perhaps
especially in Andalucia) seem to have an any-nasal-will-do approach to English words ending
with /n/ like in and on etc.
15. English / /as in sing does not occur as an independent sound in Spanish though it does occur
as an accidentalvalue (an allophone) of Spanish /n/ under the influence of a following /k/, /g/ or
/x/. It is naturally quite difficult for Spanish speakers to produce an / /which is not in such a
context, especially in fluent speech when it occurs, as it so often does, in the very frequent
unstressed word ending-ing. However, it deserves careful attention because failure can sound quite
odd. The expression huntin, shootin and fishin is well known in joking reference to an upper-class
Victorian style of speech but is now associated either with persons of very little education or with
elderly aristocrats.
16. English /l/ as produced by Spanish speakers is very unlikely to occasion failure to recognise
words but it is noteworthy that English has variations in the precise quality of /l/ that are not
parallelled in Castilian. (Catalan has some rather dark varieties though not with the English pattern
of their distribution.) It is usual for GB speakers to produce adarker ie more back (meaning
tongue-retracted ie velarised or pharyngalised) version above all when /l/ is syllabic but also when it
occurs before consonants or word-finally. A minority have a neutral rather than a dark /l/
(centralised) but to have a really light (palatalised) value is to sound quite abnormal.
The English dark variety usually has a quality quite like that of the vowel / / so that eg eatable
may sound from many native English speakers quite indistinguishable from `eat a bull. Some
British speakers, chiefly those with a London tinge to their speech, tend to replace word-final
syllabic /l/ with // so that eatable becomes /`i:tb/. This is often not noticed by other British
native speakers but students are best advised not to adopt it.
17. The English /r/ is typically an altogether weaker and softer sound than the Spanish values for the
letter r. It is identified in phonetic terminology by the term 'postalveolar approximant'. The sound of
a single Spanish r between vowels is completely regularly an alveolar tap. When word-initial or
word-final, it may also be an alveolar trill, which is what is always the value of a Spanish rr.
A witness to the extreme weakness of the English /r/ is the fact that our traditional spelling has very
numerous r's no longer pronounced by most speakers in Britain, about a third of US speakers and
practically all South Africans and Australasians. Very large numbers of GB speakers omit eg the
first /r/ from common words like prescription and programwithout anyone noticing the fact not
even pronunciation lexicographers. The retention of most of the r's of the traditional spelling by GA
speakers is the biggest single difference between GB and GA.
18. Although Spanish has fairly exactly corresponding phonemes to English /j/ and /w/, there is
hardly any tendency among English speakers to tighten their articulations of these phonemes in the
way Spanish speakers often do when using English making yessound like Jess or "What whisky
dyou want" sound like "Gwot gwisky do you gwont".
19. A well-known problem for Spanish speakers is occasioned by the fact that Spanish has no wordinitial consonant clusters of the types /sl-, sm-, sn-, sp-, st-, sk-/. With these the tendency is to add
an extra syllable to words containing them as with the Spanish borrowing from English of the word
sloganwhich becomes [ez`logan] in this case with an un-English assimilation [s z] as well.
Compare the treatments of other borrowings from English into Spanish eg Scotch, slip, slot,
smoking, snob, sport, spot, stop, starter etc.
20. Various other cluster simplifications and elisions of consonants are also to be heard in Spanish
speakersEnglish at times eg as when one not too proficient speaker was reported as using an
expression Oss Forestry which turned out to be an attempt at saying Oxford Street. It is
important to remember that, although Spanish initial ex- can be reduced to /es-/ without causing
consternation, to omit /k/ from English initial ex- tends to sound embarrassingly uneducated.
21. Speakers with a Catalan background should be always careful to avoid converting word-final
soft consonants eg /b, d, g, v, z/ etc into the corresponding sharp ones /p, t, k, f, s/ etc.
Recommended further reading: A Course in English Phonetics for Spanish Speakers by D. F. Finch
& H. Ortiz Lira. English Phonetics and Phonology for Spanish Speakers by Brian Mott.