Presentation

It's Not a Pronunciation Error – It's a New World English Variety Being Born!

---

Abstract

Some pronunciation features diverging from the established norm are not necessarily mistakes – they can be indicators of language change in progress, signs of a new variety. As language learners become more proficient, they become language users – users of a given variety. This study aimed to analyze the phonetic features of Polish English as understood to be a World English variety. First language (L1) Polish speakers who were proficient users of English were asked to read a text while being recorded. The text was designed to elicit pronunciation of specific words to determine whether participants exhibited the predicted pronunciation features. The exhibited features of Polish English such as the pronunciation of the voiced velar stop [g] in the final position of words normatively pronounced with a voiced velar nasal [ŋ], as in doing or the shift of the voiced dental fricative [ð] to a voiced alveolar stop [d] in words like mother seem to be not merely idiolectic pronunciation quirks, but regular patterns exhibited by the majority of Polish English speakers. The study begs the question: where is the line between an error in pronunciation and a feature of a new language variety? What should teachers correct and what should they accept?

Keywords: language change, descriptivism, World Englishes, language variation

How to Cite:

Skotarek, D. J. (2023). It’s not a pronunciation error – It’s a new World English variety being born. In R. I. Thomson, T. M. Derwing, J. Levis, & K. Hiebert (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, ­­­­­­­­held June 2022 at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.15713