Linguistics: Do majority languages change the phonology of minority languages?

Factual Questions
1

A call out to our linguistically experienced and educated colleagues here.

I have a casual interest in language and phonology and so I spend some time thinking about niche topics.

In dabbling with learning Irish and listening to some other languages (e.g., Breton), such as native languages of North America, I often get the feeling that I’m listening to someone with English based accents.

For example, I’ve spent a long time trying to understand Irish consonant pairs. For those who don’t know, in the Irish language, the consonants (p, ph, b, bh, t, th, d, dh, c, ch, g, gh, f, fh, s, sh, m, mh, , n, nn, nc, r, l, and ll) come in pairs.

Each of those consonants has two forms: velarized (a.k.a. “broad,” “W-colored,” leathan) and palatalized (a.k.a. “slender,” “Y-colored,” caol).

Almost every video or audio clip I find teaches these changes with equivalents to English phonemes.

For example, the “broad S” is taught as being like the English S sound /s/ and the “slender S” is taught as being the English SH sound /ʃ/.

But my thought is that this is simplification for the purposes of giving native English speakers a quick and dirty way of starting off learning.

My guess is that “broad S” should be more like /sˠ/ and “slender S” should be more like /sʲ/. It’s harder for me to learn, of course, but I consider it worth it to make the effort.

What I wonder is whether this process has actually changed the phonemics of actual speakers of Irish, as this form of teaching Irish to English speakers has kind of standardized an English accent in Irish.

Am I just being silly? Is this really a thing? Am I barking up the wrong tree trying to pronounce and hear “true” velarized and palatalized consonants instead of just using a rough English equivalent?

So, just to re-state the question in a more specific way: Have socially dominant languages (like English) pushed changes in the phonology of “dominated” languages (like Irish), standardizing a kind of “foreign accent” in the latter language?

2

The same question had occurred to me: I remember listening to the speech of the host from “No Béarla”, and to recordings of monolingual Irish speakers (from back when that was a thing), and they seemed vastly different to me. But it’s going to take a serious Irishman/Irishwoman/linguist to expound on the significance of the differences in accent.

3

Every language is influenced by every other language that speakers of that language ever encounter. That’s going to be especially true when almost everyone you encounter speaks a different language.

4

Oh, and this is more of a GQ question than a CS one. Moving.

5

Okay, but I’m asking for an answer to a somewhat more specific question. Does the Irish spoken today (or the Navaho or Sioux languages, say) have what speakers from generations past would consider an “English accent” or “foreign accent” with phonemes only approximating the original phonemes of the language.

For example, native speakers of Hindi and Bengali hear “bad accents” or “foreign accents” from people who can’t distinguish the retroflex and dental plosives, or who can’t distinguish the aspirated and unaspirated plosives, or who don’t use gemination (doubled consonants) when appropriate, or who reduce vowels in unstressed syllables. (That’s indeed how a foreigner might be portrayed as a character in a story.)

What if so many British people had settled in India that native speakers “forgot” these distinctions and all started speaking their native languages with “English” accents? Is that what has happened with Irish?

6

Yes, it’s really a thing. Most Irish is spoken by people whose native language is English. The phonemic distinctions between broad and slender (velarised and palatalised) consonants are largely ignored or expressed in a way more amenable to English phonology. As you note, the sound of Irish spoken by a native speaker is very different from typical Gaelscoilis.

7

The loss of the broad/slender consonants in spoken Irish has been compared to what it would be like if the voiced/unvoiced feature were abandoned in English.

8

I’m sorry to hear that it’s being lost. I find it a fascinating feature of the language.

But I really appreciate the specific answer to my surmising…

9

For those reading along not familiar with the terminology, that would mean that these pairs, for example, would no longer be distinguished: bad/pad, dad/tad, fat/vat, gat/cat, jump/chump, sane/zane

10

It really bothers me that pretty much all the instructional materials for learning Irish don’t even say “this is just an approximation; here’s a source if you want to learn to pronounce the consonants more precisely.” They just say “oh, slender S is like English SH” and just leave it at that." Very disappointing.

11

Has anyone seen Johanna around?

12

Johanna’s most recent post was on August 2nd.

13

Although worth noting that this works both ways. The phonemes of Hiberno-English differ from those of most varieties of British English because they have bee influenced by Irish. So the Hiberno-English phonemes for which a native speaker of Hiberno-English reaches are not the same as the ones native speakers of British English or American English would have at their disposal.

14

An analogy might be how English is (at least sometimes) taught in Japan and India, using locally familiar phonemes. If that were how the majority of speakers learned, I would expect a similar phenomenon.

Does anyone know if modern Hebrew was heavily influenced by new speakers’ prior languages? That’s not really the same situation though.

15

I think it’s similar enough

16

Might be. I don’t know much about Hebrew other than a Wikipedia article and memorizing a fragment of Genesis 1 in elementary school.

17

I’ve been working on learning Japanese for years now (admittedly at a very slow pace) and can see why this would be the case. I’d be interested to know if the situation is the same for native Japanese speakers who are learning Spanish. From what I can tell, vowels in Japanese and Spanish sound the same, or at least are a lot more similar to each other than English vowels. Maybe this would eliminate the need for such a process when a native Japanese speaker is learning Spanish instead of English.

18

Sorry, @Acsenray, we’re making more questions than we’re answering :smile:

19

No apology necessary. The more we ask, the more we learn. I’m happy that I’m not the only one interested in discussing this kind of stuff.

20

May be of interest - an elderly Irish monolingual speaker reciting Irish epic poetry in 1985: