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How many phonemes in your language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5365 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 1 of 11 24 March 2011 at 6:04pm | IP Logged |
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Whilst listening to Professor Arguelles excellent recent lecture series on language learning, my interest was piqued by a particular section on phonology in "Success in Foreign Language Learning":
"On a phonological level, there are about 200 different phonemes that can be actualised in various human languages, and yet most languages only use about 50 of them. And so what happens to our ears as we grow up - we lose the ability to really hear and perceive those other 150. And when they are present in a foreign language that we want to learn, we have to struggle, approximate with them, learn how to try to hear them again." I also recently read that the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) lists 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and 4 prosodic marks (which doesn't include extensions to the IPA for disordered speech and additional prosodic notation), from all of which English generally uses somewhere around 44 phonemes. This leads me to wonder: i) How many more phonemes are there in English when you add up all the different English accents and variations out there in the world? The best information I've found so far on this subject is summarised in the IPA chart for English Dialects, which covers a far from complete range of accents, including Australian, Canadian, American, Irish, New Zealand, Scottish, South African, Singaporean, and Welsh, in addition to Received Pronunciation and the myriad of other accents spoken throughout the various counties of England. ii) How many phonemes are used in other world languages? No idea on this one. It would be certainly be very interesting to put together a quick list here in this thread. :) iii) Wouldn't an initial study of the key phonemes that are missing from our native language (or at least a smaller subset of the most popularly used sounds from around the world) provide a big helping hand when starting to learn a new language? Having a knowledge of just some of the variations in English has certainly come in very handy when trying to get my head around new sounds from time to time. For example, having a firm grasp of the 'ch' sound in loch or the rolling 'r' in Scottish English, has helped me initially with languages like Arabic and Spanish. And who knows, being able to pronounce the retroflex 'r' and dentalised 't' in Hiberno-English, may also be advantageous one day too (perhaps with Hindi, I wouldn't be surprised). I can only guess that a sound knowledge of more key phonemes would prove very helpful when starting out in other languages. Edited by Teango on 24 March 2011 at 6:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5190 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 11 24 March 2011 at 6:49pm | IP Logged |
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My dialect of French has 17 vowel phonemes; rather extreme.
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| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5790 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 3 of 11 24 March 2011 at 11:16pm | IP Logged |
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I speak Spanish with 22 phonemes. There are only 21 phonemes that are present in all
varieties of Spanish and up to 7 additional ones in different dialects. The most noticeable missing phoneme in Spanish is the V sound. Edited by Javi on 24 March 2011 at 11:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5082 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 4 of 11 25 March 2011 at 1:51pm | IP Logged |
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I can't believe it, but it seems that according to that link you posted General American English has 26 vowel and 26
consonant phonemes. As far as I can tell, my other native language, Serbian, has 6 vowel and 25 consonant phonemes. I'm certainly grateful that I have English as at least one of my native languages. Hopefully all those extra vowels will come in handy some day! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5562 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 11 30 March 2011 at 4:58pm | IP Logged |
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In brief,
Standard Northern Vietnamese has 21 consonant phonemes and 11 vowel phonemes. Standard Southern Vietnamese has 22 consonant phonemes and 11 vowel phonemes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Delaunay Pentaglot Newbie Hungary Joined 4798 days ago 16 posts - 27 votes Speaks: German, Hungarian*, English, Japanese, Dutch Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 11 18 April 2011 at 6:34pm | IP Logged |
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Hungarian has 14 vowel and 25 consonant phonemes. So it comes as quite a surprise when a language has more than 1 or 2 phonemes that I don't have in my mother tongue.
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| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5365 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 7 of 11 18 April 2011 at 9:06pm | IP Logged |
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I heard about the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (or UPSID) over the weekend - a statistical survey of 919 phonemes across 451 languages! Unfortunately, the main page seems to be down and the legacy PROLOG interface is unlikely to run on most modern machines. However I did find this little interface from the University of Frankfurt's Institute for Phonetics that uses an earlier zip file of the database and could prove quite interesting. Edited by Teango on 18 April 2011 at 9:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5362 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 8 of 11 22 April 2011 at 10:22pm | IP Logged |
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I really don't know about Finnish. I sat back and counted in my head 8 vowels (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /y/, /ö/, /æ/) and consonants about 14? So 22 total, all of which are written with their own letter except /ŋ/. That number includes /f/, /g/ and /b/ which are foreign influences BUT have become totally integrated into the language (/f/ moreso than /g/ and /b/) and a large chunk of the population pronounces them (others switch them for their voiceless counterparts). The number jumps to 23 if you include /ʃ/ which is part of the official pronunciation of words like šekki and šokki but in my experience a huge number of people including myself don't produce this sound (switch it with /s/), plus it occurs so rarely and only in loan words that I personally don't count it. [ʒ] is without a doubt not a part of Finnish even though it has its own letter in the alphabet - I can't think of a single word with this sound.
All vowels can occur short or long. I'm about 90% sure that--all dialects of Finnish considered--all the consonants can also be lengthened (someone correct me if I'm wrong! not a native), although this is NOT true of standard Finnish, where you really don't see sounds like /h:/ or /ʋ:/ which are totally A-OK in other dialects. Edited by kyssäkaali on 22 April 2011 at 10:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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