As an ESOL teacher, I’ve taught students from over 50 countries. I’ve noticed a lot of patterns among different language groups, but one thing I’ve noticed consistently is that the accents of Southeast Asians–Vietnamese and Thai in particular–are extremely thick. Compared to other students at a similar skill level of reading, writing, and grammar, students from that part of the world have extreme difficulty making themselves understood to me and to their classmates.
I’m assuming that languages from that family (those families? Are Thai and Vietnamese at all linguistically related?) are missing certain phonemes the English depends upon. But I’m not sure which ones. Can anyone shed light?
Never had to make certain sounds with their mother languages, so they gotta learn how to form their mouth to make them, before they can integrate them into their speech. The muscle memory involved with placing your tongue at a certain point in your mouth, the form of your lips, yadda yadda.
Although I’m probably telling you what you already know.
Both are tonal languages (as are Chinese and other languages). Tonal languages differentiate words through tones, such as rising, falling, flat, rising then falling, falling then rising. Your students may be confused by a language that doesn’t have this aspect. It also seems, to me at least, a non-linguist, that a lot of the pronunciation in these languages is nasal or aspirated, in order to impact the tones. Again, not something people do in English, at least outside of the Upper Midwest (just kidding).
Many English consonants and consonant blends do not exist in Thai. Thus they might have to say “sa-lide” if trying to pronounce “slide.” They have no “th”, no “zh”, no “sh”; they never have an “s” at the end of a word, et cetera. Even blends which do exist in Thai (e.g. “plah” meaning fish) may be mispronounced: Rural Thais often say “pah” for fish instead of “plah.”
When I taught English I made the kids laugh by saying they were too shy to speak English! To enunciate properly they need to expose their tongues sometimes (e.g. to pronounce “th”), and (holding hand in front of mouth to demonstrate) be willing to eject spittle when saying “s” or “sh.” I was being silly, but think there may be truth to the observation. (Anyway, my students began pronouncing better.)
English lessons in school are mostly of the written language (at least in the absence of a foreigner as teacher) so Thais who only learn the language by fraternizing with tourists, e.g. in Pattaya, will often be much more fluent than even a Thai with several years of formal English training.
To answer your parenthetical question:
No, Thai and Vietnamese are considered to have no “genetic” relation linguistically. Vietnamese is in the Viet-Muong branch of the Mon-Khmer family (itself a branch of Austro-Asiatic), while Thai is in the (Southwestern branch of) Tai branch of Kam-Tai (itself a branch of Tai-Kadai). While those who postulate long-distance connections may place both these groups into an “Austric superfamily”, even within that family Austro-Asiatic is considered sibling to the Hmong-Mien family, while Tai-Kadai (aka Daic) is sometimes theorized to descend from an Austronesian language of the Philippines which returned to the mainland and underwent massive change. … But,
Yes, both Thai and Vietnamese are believed to have borrowed extensively and in several ways, including phonologically, from Chinese (or its relatives).
While we are not strictly a tonal language, I’ve found that tone DOES impact English.
The example I always use: Say the words “orange tree” twice. The first time, say it as if you were simply referring to the citrus-bearing tree. The second time, say it as if you were trying to refer to a tree that was the color orange. It’s fairly simple to change your intonation to make both of these meanings clear.
So English is not tonal in the sense that the same sounds said in different tones are different words completely. We are somewhat tonal, though, in the sense that changing the tone changes the sense of the words.
Yes, English uses tone a lot even though it’s not a “tonal” language.
Thai, OTOH, often sounds somewhat monotone, despite that it is a tonal language. This is in part due to the fact that of the five tones the one called common tone is by far the most … well, common.
Many Americans who know only a little Thai, try to add tones where unneeded. I have an American friend who goes to KFC to order “Burger Gai” (a chicken burger) and comes back complaining that the Thais don’t even understand Thai :smack: – they didn’t even know what he was trying to order, despite that “Burger Gai” is their main offering! :smack: He demonstrated the elaborate sing-song fashion in which he was saying “Burger Gai;” had he spoken in a deliberate monotone (or even just said “chicken burger”) there’d have been no problem.
Just a bit of anecdote to throw in: I have a cousin who, for many years, has taken an interest in Burmese Buddhist culture. He has visited there, and has taken an interest in the linguistics of the language. Now he makes a sideline (in California) of tutoring Burmese immigrants in English, focusing in particular on teaching pronunciation.
He states that Burmese people who learn English as a second language (in their home country) will often become quite proficient and fluent in English reading, comprehension, vocabulary and grammar, yet their pronunciation remains utterly unintelligible to native English-hearing ears. Thus, he has found a market for his teaching services among the Burmese immigrant community here.
For Vietnamese speaking English, it’s that they tend to leave the final consonants off of words. Think about how important final consonants are in English. Aside from making the word itself clear, they tell you number and tense.
Read a paragraph leaving off the final consonants off, and see how ambiguous and confusing it sounds.
Vietnamese also don’t usually have an easy time pronouncing “j” sounds, which get jumbled up with “z” sounds and “tr” and other sounds. A number of combined sounds like “ch” and “tr” are pronounced farther back in the mouth in Vietnamese, and sound very odd in English use.
Tenses and plurals are often left off, and he/she are often used interchangeably.
These are just my observations, after almost 20 years of hanging out with lots of Vietnamese in-laws and friends.
Yup, most of the beer bar girls I’ve ever spoken to in Pattaya are much better at English than the engineers at my facility in Rayong.
Let me inject a little IMHO here, but I can’t stand it when most Thai women speak Thai. It sounds so whiney and cry-babyish. For some reason, only about a quarter of men sound whiney and cry-babyish. And this is how they (the professionals) attempt to speak English until they have more experience.
Languages from the same geographic area may be from different families but still have traits in common (see sprachbund).
If you’re old enough, think of the Gabor sisters. Their accents sounded definitely “European” even though Hungarian is unrelated to most other European languages.
I have only learned one language other than English, but after several years of study I was amazed by a teacher who focused on phonetics and rhythm (which were quite different than English). He greatly decreased my accent.
There’s a term for the kind of tonality English uses, but I can’t remember it off the top of my head. I want to say “stress toned”, but I’m not sure that’s right. Essentially it means that tonality is used as a means to indicate things like stress, emotion, sarcasm etc rather than there being a phonemic distinction. (Though I understand that some phonemically tonal languages also often have a few stress tones here and there in very specific instances).
