English Pronunciation for Spanish Speakers

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English Pronunciation for Spanish

Speakers
The Simple Vowels
The following remarks deal with the problems which native speakers of Spanish are likely
to experience with the English vowels. The type of English referred to is the General
British pronunciation (GB) and not the General American variety from which it has a
small number of notable differences.
1. The GB vowel / i: / as in seat should give no qualitative problems but it may
sometimes be made in forms inappropriately brief and yet occasionally excessively
stretched. It is usually, but by no means always, a fairly long vowel so that, given the
typically short value of the qualitatively comparable Spanish vowel, it may sound
markedly brisk or clipped and possibly uncomfortably like the more regularly short
English vowel phoneme / /, as when eg seat may sound too much like sit. The context
in which it is desirable to give / i: / its minimum length is in a syllable which is closed by
one or more of the eight sharp (aka 'voiceless' or 'fortis') English consonants /p, t, k,
, f, , s / and / /.
1b. The weak vowel / i /, the final vowel in city and easy, should give no problems if it is
not made strong (and thereby long). In America very widely and in Australasia universally
there is extensive use of / i: / instead of / i / in such final syllables.
2. The GB vowel / / as in sit has no precise equivalent in Spanish and is therefore very
likely to be attempted in a form too much like /i:/, making eg sit sound too much like
seat. As diagrams show, it's as near (in position and therefore in quality) to / / as to
/i:/.
Diagrams for GB vowels and diphthongs may be seen at 3.1.46 and for Spanish vowels
at 9.2 on this website.
3. The GB vowel /e/, as in leg , should give little or no trouble.
4. The GB vowel / / as in hat is today for most British speakers about the same sort of
vowel as is represented in the spelling of Spanish by the letter a. A small minority of
older British speakers and many Americans and Australians etc have values of / /
much nearer to / e /. Spanish speakers will have to be careful not to produce it without
sufficient differentiation from / / from which it now differs so little that British native
English speakers sometimes mistake each others intentions in regard to it.
5. The GB vowel / / as in arm or calm is likely to be attempted with a quality that too
much suggests a drawled / / because the tongue has not been drawn back far enough
in its production. It is usually a fairly long vowel except before sharp (aka voiceless etc)
consonants.
6. The GB vowel / / as in got sometimes tends to be attempted with too much
rounding of the lips and with such a high tongue position that it is not sufficiently
differentiated from the vowel / /.
7. The GB vowel / / as in saw should give no difficulty so long as it is made fairly long
without submitting it to any degree of diphthongisation which would cause it to sound
too much like / u / or / /.
8. The GB vowel / / as in put has no precise equivalent in Spanish and is therefore very
likely to be attempted in a form too much like / u: / but, as diagrams show, it's as near
(in position and therefore in quality) to // as to / u: /. Saying / / with rounded lips
should help to produce a satisfactory / /.

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9. The GB vowel / u: / as in too should give no qualitative problems but it may

sometimes be uttered in inappropriately brief (or very occasionally excessively stretched)
forms. It is usually a fairly long vowel so that, given the typically short value of the
qualitatively comparable Spanish vowel, it may sound markedly brisk or clipped and
uncomfortably like the more regularly short English vowel phoneme / /, as when eg
soot may sound too much like suit. It has its minimum length in syllables closed by one
or more of the sharp consonants.
9b. The weak vowel /u/, the final vowel in eg cuckoo, w and Zulu, should give no
problems if it is not made strong (and thereby long). It is commonly replaced by the
corresponding strong vowel in various other forms of English.
10. The GB vowel / / as in cup has a higher and more back tongue posture than
Spanish / a /.
11. The GB vowel / / as in fur is never very short or it would be indistinguishable from
/ / with which it shares its very neutral obscure or indeterminate quality. Spanish
speakers may make this vowel too forward and therefore too much like / e / or / e /.
12. The GB vowel / / is often wrongly described as never occurring in stressed
syllables though it is quite true that only a very few words have it stressed and none of
those invariably so. It is often stressed in the adverb just (but not in the adjective) and in
the first syllable of threepenny etc. Students are best advised never to stress it.

The General British Diphthongs

13. The GB diphthong / e / as in page has a Spanish equivalent so that it should give no
trouble if sufficiently short notably before sharp consonants.
14. The GB diphthong / / as in go is rather different from the Spanish diphthong ou.
If not begun fairly centrally it may sound abnormal and too like / u /.
15. The GB diphthong / a / as in five, if not begun fairly front, may sound abnormal or
too like / i /.
16. The GB diphthong / a / as in now, if not begun front enough may sound abnormal
or too like / u /.
When either of the last two diphthongs is followed by a schwa to give / a, a / in
such words as fire and hour, the result is often a single syllable with weakening of the
middle sound which usually disappears altogether in unstressed syllables as in empire or
rushhour.
17. The GB diphthong / / as in join is rarely problematical.
All the above diphthongs are usually fairly long but care must be taken to reduce them
when they are followed by sharp consonants or enclitic syllables (ones which are, or
behave as if they were, further unstressed syllables of the same word). Failure to do so
will produce the effect of making inappropriate word divisions eg instead of joking
saying Joe King.
18. The GB diphthong / /as in near if not begun with a sufficiently central quality may
strike many British speakers as abnormal and too like / i: / though that's not very likely
to cause any misunderstanding.
19. The GB diphthong / e / as in hair may be begun too high producing the effect of /
e / as in player though that's not very likely to cause any misunderstanding. By a high
proportion of GB speakers it's regularly made as a long simple vowel [] so students
may aim for this value if they prefer. This latter smoothed value is used by almost all
speakers unless stressed and immediately before a break in rhythm.
20. The GB diphthong / /as in cure, if not begun with a sufficiently central quality,

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may strike many British speakers as too much like / u: / as in queuer, sewer, fewer or
doer though that's not very likely to cause any misunderstanding. Like / e / it has
most often its smoothed version [] unless it's stressed and comes immediately before a
break in rhythm.

English Consonants for Spanish Speakers

1. Although vowel values may be strikingly different in one part of the English-speaking
world 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

r[]

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

rr

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 bacharan which 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 of church 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.

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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 word able 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 versus watching 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, cheese and 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), Jerusalem etc 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 accidental value (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
a darker 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

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(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
program without 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 yes
sound 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 word-initial 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 slogan which 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 speakers English 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 extends 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.

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