Languages in Contact || LANGUAGE CONTACTS: PHONETIC ASPECTS

LANGUAGE CONTACTS: PHONETIC ASPECTSAuthor(s): LIYA V. BONDARKOSource: Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, Vol. 28, Languages in Contact (2000), pp. 55-65Published by: Editions Rodopi B.V.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40997151 .

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Languages in Contact, edited by D.G. Gilbers, J. Nerbonne, and J. Schaeken (= Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, vol. 28), 55-65. Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000.

LANGUAGE CONTACTS: PHONETIC ASPECTS

LIYA V. BONDARKO

Language contact is one of the main factors causing dramatic impact on a language system. Linguistic analysis of ancient extant manuscripts of comparable content such as early translations of the Bible into various languages gives dis- tinct possibilities to reveal the changes that languages show in the process of interaction. The impact of such contacts on the sound systems can be inferred on the basis of comparison of the traditional methods of representing native linguistic units and the methods of representing in written form the so-called borrowed grammatical or lexical linguistic units. Unfortunately, this sort of evidence is ut- terly rare and should be regarded as an exception presenting only scanty information. In fact, the research into phonetic consequences of language contact became possible only with the appearance of reliable methods of speech sound registra- tion.

The most common type of language contact is the situation when in a certain community two languages coexist on equal terms - the so-called mother tongue and the official language. Such a situation was characteristic of the republics of the former USSR and is still typical of the national republics of the Russian Fed- eration as well as of the ex-colonies of Great Britain and France. The important thing is that the second (official) language is not only the language of official communication but is very often used as the mother tongue. It is well known that in many republics of the former USSR a good command of Russian was not only prestigious but natural, since Russian was often spoken at home in the family. Even today this natural bilingualism seems to remain in some now independent republics despite the nation-orientated official language policy. Without going into details about advantages and disadvantages of the language policy of the So- viet government, I would like to emphasize that a multi-national country like the USSR gives the possibility of systematic research into all types of inter-language interference, including phonetic interference (cf. Bondarko and Verbickaja 1987).

The contacts of the Russian language and the languages of the republics of the former USSR lead to obvious mutual influence. The Russian in the realization of the native population of national republics receives peculiar phonetic features re- sulting both from phonological and phonetic properties of the sound system of their mother tongue and transforms into a specific 'national' variant of the stan-



56 LIYA V. BONDARKO

dard Russian language in its colloquial and sometimes official form (Zorina 1996).

This variant is characteristic not only of the native speakers of some other language, but also of the native speakers of Russian living in a non-native language environment. For example, the speech of Russians in Tbilisi, Georgia, can undoubtedly be viewed as one of such 'national variants'. There is much evidence to prove that its specific features are caused not by the Georgian language itself (if, say, Russian citizens of Tbilisi do not speak Georgian), but by the Russian speech of Georgians that can be heard in Tbilisi today.

The reverse tendency existent - namely the influence of the Russian language on the national languages - presents a problem in itself. The influence of Russian on other contacting languages can be proved, for instance, by the so-called borrowed phonemes that come into national languages with lexical loans from Rus- sian.

Another type of language contact leading to phonetic interference is the so- called intra-language interference. It emerges when the standard language and dialects in contact are bringing to life regional variants or forms of the standard language.

It is interesting that the criteria used for evaluating the results of inter-language interference and intra-language interference vary quite noticeably: for example, a glottalized realization of the Russian plosives /p, t, k/ in the speech of Georgians seems to be quite acceptable, which can be explained by the fact that such realization is restricted to a particular region and presents no threat of wide expansion into the standard literary language. On the other hand, a fricative realization of the voiced velar consonant in such words as god, gramotnyj is viewed as a dialectal feature and a source for spoiling the standard literary language.

The influence of the Russian standard literary language on the dialects is obvious and can be described as a destructive power continually pressing the sound systems of old Russian dialects to change.

The interaction of sound systems in the process of teaching foreign languages is of special interest for phoneticians from the point of view of both general phonetics and psycholinguistics (Bondarko and Lebedeva 1983).

Traditionally, speaking a foreign language in the situation of classroom bilingualism - the so-called classroom speech - is regarded as having a very narrow domain of functioning and a very limited importance in the general problem of interference since it shows no significant impact on any of the contacting languages. However, observations on the speech of young native speakers of Russian who know English reveal the possibility of a quite noticeable influence of some specific English features on the Russian speech of such people. Strange though it may seem, the system of intonation proves the most vulnerable in this case.



LANGUAGE CONTACTS: PHONETIC ASPECTS 57

In the process of teaching Russian pronunciation to foreign students the interference of sound systems presents as important a problem as other problems topi- cal for inter-language interference in general. The realization of the sound units of Russian by native speakers of other languages carries the information about both general phonetic features of the Russian speech and its specific characteristics that are subject to compulsary modification by all non-native speakers of Russian. The former imply the standard realization of these features, that is, common errors in pronunciation of non-native sounds, the latter include pronunciation difficulties in speaking Russian particularly because it is not a mother tongue. Of special interest is the type of interference which is caused by the sound system of the student's mother tongue, that is, when the mistake is connected not with the fact that something foreign is pronounced, but with similarities and dissimilarities of the two sound systems - that of Russian and the student's native language.

Of exceptional interest in the process of teaching a foreign language are bilingual students, for instance, the citizens of Russia for whom Russian is the second native language. It is important to study the dynamics of such bilingualism when a bilingual person studies a third, foreign, language. In the succession 'mother tongue - Russian language - foreign language' various combinations of the three elements are possible: a) mother tongue and Russian can be opposed to a foreign language, b) mother tongue is in opposition to two non-native languages, Russian and foreign, c) all the three function as totally independent systems.

The present report deals with the data on the character of interference emerg- ing in all the above-mentioned situations. The data were obtained at the Depart- ment of Phonetics and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages at St. Petersburg State University, as a result of many years of systematic research into the problem. Our attention has been focused on standard Russian pronunciation and its modifications in these situations of language contact. At different stages of the research the material and methodology varied, but on the whole we tried to obtain reliable data based on representative material using the methods of experimental phonetics.

The inter-language interference was studied as follows. The citizens of Tallinn, Baku, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Kishinyov, Riga, Vilnius, Minsk and some Ukrainian cities, including Kiev and L'viv (L'vov), were used as subjects. Native citizens of these cities aged 18 to 50 represented two levels of command of Russian, speaking with strong and slight accent. In each city, the speech of 20 people was studied, 10 in each group. They all were asked to record the same text, which can conventionally be called phonetically balanced since it includes 200 of the most frequent syllables of the Russian speech. Before reading the text each subject re- corded his/her personal data (the year and place of birth, education, current place of residence, etc.) as samples of quasi-spontaneous speech. Thus the recordings of the same Russian text in the realisation of the speakers of Estonian, Azerbaijani,



58 LIYA V. BONDARKO

Georgian, Armenian, Moldavian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian and Ukrain- ian were analysed. The results of this research have been presented in a series of publications including a monograph (Bondarko and Verbickaja 1987). Some important issues are worth mentioning here.

All the groups of subjects, irrespective of their mother tongue and the Russian language competence, suffered strong influence of orthography when reading the text. It showed, for example, when in place of the vowels represented by the letter o in unstressed positions the vowel [o] was pronounced. The realization of final voiced consonants represented by respective letters can also be considered spelling pronunciation. As we will see later, the principles of Russian orthography (retaining the uniformity of the orthographic representation of a morpheme, even if it changes phonetically), noticeably complicates the process of acquiring a standard Russian pronunciation by foreign students.

Incorrect realization of soft consonants, labials and a fore-lingual sonorant trill, unavoidable for all the subjects, can be regarded as phonological errors proper. It is to be noted that this is typical not only of native speakers of languages where the opposition of soft and hard consonants is absent, but also of speakers of the typologically closely related languages Ukrainian and Byelorussian where the opposition is present on the phonological level, although the phonetic quality and the distribution of palatalized and velarized consonants is different. This fact also accounts for mistakes in realizations of vowels following palatalized consonants: they tend to be not enough front and not enough close. Impossibility to pronounce the Russian vowel ill correctly is another universal mistake of all subjects.

These data is brought to life by the inherent properties of the Russian sound system, its specific phonological oppositions and specific phonetic realizations.

On the other hand, all our subjects, with the exception of Ukrainian and Byelo- russian speakers, pronounce a lateral IV as non-velarized - a typical 'mid- European' realization. Though connected with the specific Russian articulation of the sonant, general phonetic features of most of the languages trigger this mispro- nunciation.

The influence of the subjects' native language is revealed in other cases, too, and it leads to mispronunciations that may be termed 'diagnostic'. For instance, absence of voiced and voiceless consonant opposition in Estonian triggers the pronunciation of Russian voiced consonants by Estonian speakers as half- voiced (lenis), that may be perceived by Russians as voiceless. Or, Estonian speakers of Russian may pronounce voiced consonants instead of voiceless ones. These mistakes are undoubtedly the result of the influence of the native sound system. The peculiar articulation of Russian I si and III is due to the absence of the opposition of the two kinds of fricatives (those with a round narrowing and those with a long narrowing) in Estonian.




Error analysis of this kind can result in a fairly precise description of the influence of each of these languages on the Russian speech. Such descriptions can provide the basis not only for specific methods of teaching Russian as a foreign language, but for applied research in the fields of psychology and forensic phonetics as well.

Intra-language interference can be defined as deviation from the standard pronunciation of the educated urban native population under the influence of dialects bordering the urban areas. With the purpose of investigating the problem, we have performed a detailed analysis of speech peculiarities of natives of the cities of Vologda, Arkhangelsk and Perm', lying in the North-Russian dialect area, Kursk, Ryazan' and Smolensk, lying in the South-Russian dialect area, Nizhniy Novgorod (Gorkiy), Pskov, Yaroslavl' and Volgograd, lying in the Mid-Russian dialect area, and Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) and Chelyabinsk, having contacts with the Ural dialect areas. The analysis of intra-language interference can give an insight into the 'language memory' of the standard speakers who, being natives of the region, are in constant contact with dialect speakers or who retain in their own speech dialectal features characteristic of older speakers. As is to be expected, the analysis of such material yields data other than the analysis of inter-language interference. The most stable dialectal features are those that are the most typical (Russkaja dialektologija 1989).

Speaking about the standard Russian pronunciation, we can draw the following conclusions: South-Russian dialects mostly influence the realization of consonants and the North-Russian dialects mostly influence the realization of vowels. For instance, a velar voiced fricative is pronounced instead of a stop by 80% of Kursk and Ryazan' natives and by 70% of Smolensk natives, while mid-open vowels are pronounced as closer ones by 40% of Vologda natives, 100% Arkhan- gelsk and 80% Perm' natives. It should be noted that the dialectal features, although present in our subjects' speech, do not occur regularly and that some phonetic peculiarities are not substandard. Besides, spelling pronunciation was quite characteristic of near-standard subjects. We may conclude that the reading of or- thographically correct texts may present a problem even for native speakers with good communication skills and leads to mistakes on the phonetic level.

Comparing intra-language and inter-language interference, it should be em- phasized that the mechanisms of sound system interaction in these two cases are fundamentally different. In the case of intra-language interference, the speaker uses a familiar phoneme system and the dialect influence triggers either a misuse of a phoneme (an Orthoepie mistake) or a wrong phoneme realization (an ortho- phonic mistake). In the case of inter-language interference, the speaker has to use a foreign phoneme system and foreign phonetic units. Speaking a foreign language, he or she has to construct the sound form of a word more or less anew (de-



60 LIYA V. BONDARKO

pending on his or her foreign language competence) or reconstruct it on the basis of a perceived sound sequence.

Phonetic mechanisms of both types of interference have to be investigated by themselves, since by analyzing speech with traces of language interference, we are dealing with the final result, and not with the process of sound system interaction. The difficulty of studying language interference on the sound level is due to the fact that sound units, having no meaning, function only within linguistic units of higher levels. So, the experimental analysis requires special methods that, on the one hand, can give all the linguistically relevant answers and, on the other hand, do not support the illusion that the subjects are capable of conscious evaluation of their speech behaviour on the phonetic level.

Mechanisms of foreign language speech production and perception are at the center of attention now, as well as they have been many years ago. The absence of complete symmetry between these two processes and the impossibility of making direct experiments has brought to life a whole range of roundabout methods of describing the processes.

There are two opposite views on human perceptual abilities. The traditional view for linguists claims that the perceptual space is analogous to the phonological space. L.V. Scerba thought that a speaker could differentiate between as many vowel sounds as there are vowel phonemes in his or her language, and that other differences "do not lie in the lighted sphere of the linguistic consciousness". Later the idea of phonological conditioning of perceptual abilities has been reflected in various terms, such as 'phonological hearing' or 'phonological sieve', but it has always kept in agreement with Scerba' s words (Scerba 1983).

The other view is the result of psychophysiological research into human aural perception. It claims that the ability to differentiate between various classes of speech sounds (for example, vowels) is universal, thus the perceptual space does not relate to the phonological system: apparently all people can perceive the same classes of sounds and use the same strategies (Fiziologija sensornyx sistem 1972).

Nowadays, the former viewpoint seems too categorical and too general. The latter is at variance with the numerous facts known both to phoneticians working in the field of perception, and to foreign language teachers, who from time to time face students unable to hear the difference between the sounds of their native tongue and those of the language they study.

A third view on human perceptual abilities can be formulated on the basis of the aforementioned experimental phonetic data (Bondarko 1981). We can ascer- tain that a speaker can differentiate between more sounds than there are phonemes in his native language, but ultimately this ability is conditioned by the phonological relations in the sound system. For instance, the fact that Russians are very sensitive to /-like transitions at the beginning and at the end of non-front vowels



LANGUAGE CONTACTS: PHONETIC ASPECTS 6 1

should be explained by the fact that this phonetic feature is used for the identification of soft consonants.

Studies of perceptual abilities of speakers of a given language are extremely important for both theoretical deductions and practical purposes: the perceptual relevance of a sound is often an indication of its functional independence, and comprehensive knowledge of peculiarities of perception in a sound system is nec- essary for the description of sound changes in contacting languages.

Here are some examples of various aspects of sound interference in different types of language contact. It is well known that similar phonetic features can have a different phonemic status in different languages. The influence it may have on perceptual abilities of speakers of these languages can be shown in experimental data derived from the analysis of perception of long and short vowels, nasalized and non-nasalized vowels and, finally, front and other than front vowels. In all the cases the vowels were taken from a natural context, and the subjects were native speakers of languages where the corresponding features have a different phonemic status.

In German and Kyrgyz - languages that are typologically very distant - vowel duration is phonologically relevant. While German long and short vowels differ in quality as well as in quantity, the difference between Kyrgyz long and short vowels is only quantitative (Bajterekova 1978). Apparently, this accounts for the fact that German vowels are actually twice as short as Kyrgyz vowels, so that the Kyrgyz subjects identify long German vowels only in 45% of the cases. Besides, the phonetic realization of Kyrgyz long vowels, unlike German ones, is often characterized by two intensity maxima (which is a relic of their origin from VCV sequences with a later consonant elision). The German subjects often perceived long Kyrgyz vowels as combinations of two vowels of the same kind or, if one of the intensity peaks was lacking, as short vowels, although their actual duration was about 100 ms and close to that of German long vowels. The fact that speakers of German mostly identify phonemically long vowels of their native tongue correctly and that they mostly identify long Kyrgyz vowels incorrectly (though the absolute vowel duration is comparable in both cases), shows that vowel quality serves as the main factor in the opposition of long and short vowels in German. Positive correlation of the absolute vowel duration and the correct identification by the Kyrgyz speakers proves that the main factor in this opposition in the Kyrgyz language is vowel duration.

The problem of perception of phonologically relevant features by speakers of different languages was dealt with in a study in which the perception of the Ka- zakh front rounded and unrounded vowels /W, /ae/ and English vowels /3:/, /ae/ were compared with the perception of the Russian vowels /a/ and loi in the context of palatalized consonants (Abuov 1978). The formant characteristics of all these vowels are very similar, but since their phonemic status is different, we



62 LIYA V. BONDARKO

could expect differences in the interpretation by speakers of different languages. The results of the study revealed that it is not always the case that vowels of the speaker's native language are perceived better than vowels of a foreign language. In the experiment, Russian subjects normally perceived Russian vowel allophones better than the vowels of English and Kazakh. English subjects adequately perceived a lack of labialization and frontness of the English /ae/, though in other cases, they had the same difficulties in categorizing English vowels as Russian and Kazakh subjects did.

It is interesting to note that some vowel features are perceived better than the vowel as a whole. The perception of one and the same stimulus (a synthesized vowel of the quality approximating one of the six natural speech vowels) depends on the rules of phonetic organization of the word form. Lower scores in the perceptual results of the Kazakh subjects witness principal differences with regard to the phonemic status of the vowel in their language, where vowel harmony plays the most important role in word formation.

In this context, studies of language interference that takes place in the situation of Kyrgyz students learning French are worth mentioning. It is well known that there is a phonological opposition of French half-open and half-close vowels which is absent in Kyrgyz, where open and close vowels are considered to be al- lophonic variations (Kasymova 1991). Thus, the Kyrgyz subjects are apt to perceive French vowels as closer vowels and to consider French open vowels to be more like vowels in Kyrgyz. It is interesting to note that the French subjects regarded the Kyrgyz vowels more like French close vowels.

The investigation of factors which influence the perception of sounds of one's native (as opposed to a foreign) language was carried out using synthesized vowels, which were presented to Russian, French and Georgian speakers (Ogorod- nikova 1983). It turned out that the stimuli related to the i-a-u vowel triangle were perceived by all subjects as referring to the corresponding vowels of their native languages. When the formant values of the stimulus did not directly correspond to those of the allophone of a subject's native language, the accuracy of the subjects' responses were influenced by their knowledge of foreign languages. Thus, a native of Georgian who spoke French as a foreign language, was more precise in matching the properties of the synthesized stimulus with the transcription sign of the corresponding vowel. When the subjects were asked to imitate the synthesized stimulus, it turned out that some of them performed quite well and their pronunciation reflected the properties of the stimulus even if they were not characteristic of the subject's native language.

It should be mentioned that the study of perception and imitation of foreign language sounds and synthesized stimuli, which to various degrees resemble the allophones of the speaker's native language, was carried out in the former USSR in the situation of language contact of Russian with native languages and is con-




tinued nowadays, using the language material of multilingual Russia. These studies are both of theoretical and practical value, for the results can be applied in foreign language teaching. A mere enumeration of research projects carried out at the Department of Phonetics of St. Petersburg University would take up a few pages.

It is now possible to draw conclusions and discuss the results of the studies concerning the mechanisms of the interaction of sound systems at the level of speech communication of bilingual subjects or students, who learn a second or a third foreign language.

First of all, there is no doubt that the idea of the universal nature of distinctive features forming phonological oppositions, is not supported by experimental data: the perception of phonetic correlates of distinctive features is not governed by universal laws, but depends on actual phonetic characteristics of a given sound system. The second important conclusion is the necessity to introduce changes into our traditional knowledge about phonological perception. In sound perception the listener's judgments are not influenced exclusively by the phonological system of his own language, which induces him to classify the sounds he hears as phonemes of his native tongue. He is capable of making more subtle discrimina- tions based on general principles of audio processing of speech signals, as well as on his knowledge of foreign languages and on his individual abilities as a listener. One of the most important properties of phonological perception is that it pro- vides different mechanisms for the processing of native and non-native language sounds.

The influence of a speaker's native language on his ability to communicate in a foreign language (or his second native language) can be conditioned by a combination of his abilities both on the sensory and motor levels:

Sensory level Motor level Result 1 . 1 can't hear it I can't pronounce it correctly A recurrent mistake on the

perception level 2. 1 can hear it I can't pronounce it A recurrent mistake on the production level 3. 1 can hear it I can pronounce it correctly No phonetic conditions for mistakes 4. 1 can't hear it I can pronounce it correctly An irregular mistake

At first sight combinations No. 1 and No. 4 may evoke contradictions. The first one, 'I can't hear it, therefore I can't pronounce it' seems to contradict such con- ceptions as motor theory and analysis by synthesis theory, as it introduces the situation in the reverse order: from the point of view of these classical theories, the articulatory aspect is a means for simplification, re-coding the acoustic signal in the perception process, whereas in our case it is viewed as a subordinate, de-



64 LIYA V. BONDARKO

pendent on the sensorie aspect. Speech perception theories are all based on the speaker's behavior in the framework of his native language, when articulatory- acoustic links defined by his phonological system are established. In our case, we are dealing with a quite different situation: perception and production of foreign language sounds by the speaker whose perceptual abilities have already been formed within the framework of his native language. The combination No. 4 'I can't hear it, but I can pronounce it correctly', seems paradoxical only if we as- sume that acquisition (mastering) of the sound system of a foreign language takes place without the speaker's preliminary knowledge of it. As a rule, we observe quite the opposite: the speaker has some idea about the sound system of the foreign language he is going to master and tries to make his pronunciation as close to the original as possible. For example, students learning French, pronounce nasal vowels instead of oral ones, or people imitating Georgian accent, produce ejec- tives in contexts where they never occur. '

In conclusion, I would like to point out that the situation of language contact characteristic of any society, calls for the investigation of both sociological and psychological aspects of the problem.

In Russia the long history of research into phonetic interference in the situation of language contact yielded invaluable data, and at the same time made the train- ing of expert phoneticians - representing the mutilingual community of the former USSR and nowadays of Russia - more efficient (Bondarko 1995).

Department of Phonetics, St. Petersburg State University

REFERENCES

Abuov, Z. 1978 Vlijanie fonologiceskoj sistemy na vosprijatie foneticeskix priznakov glasnyx.

Leningrad. Bondarko, L.V.

1981 Foneticeskoe opisaniejazyka i fonologiceskoe opisanie reci. Leningrad. 1995 Foneticeskij fond jazykov Rossii. Vozrozdenie kuVtury Rossii: Jazyk i ètnos.

Sankt-Peterburg. Bondarko, L.V., and G.N. Lebedeva

1983 "Opyt opisanija svojstv fonologiõeskogo sluxa", Voprosy jazykoznanija 1983/2, 9-19.

Bondarko, L.V., and L.A. Verbickaja (eds.) 1987 Interferencija zvukovyx sistem. Leningrad.

Bajterekova, G. 1978 Fonologiceskaja interpretaci) a foneticeskix svojstv zvukov reci (èksperimen-

tal 'no-foneticeskoe issledovanie vosprijatija dlitel 'nosti glasnyx v kirgizskom i nemeckom jazykax) . Leningrad.

Fiziologija sensornyx sistem 1972 G.V. Gezsuni (ed.), Fiziologija sensornyx sistem II. Leningrad.




Kasymova, B. 1991 Issledovanie perceptivnoj bazy jazyka v uslovijax hirgizsko-russkogo dvujazy-

cija. Biskek. Ogorodnikova, K.

1983 Universal 'noe i fonologiceskoe prostranstvo glasnyx. Leningrad. Russkaja dialektologija

1989 L.L. Kasatkin (ed.), Russkaja dialektologija. Moskva. Scerba, L.V.

1983 Russkie glasnye v kacestvennom i kolicestvennom otnosenii. Leningrad. Zorina, Z.G.

1996 Foneticeskie osobennosti funkcionirovanija russkogo jazyka v uslovijax dvuja- zycija. Sankt-Peterburg.



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