Abstract
This paper analyses the pronunciation of 24 students in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in the south of China, based on a 3-min conversation with each of them, and it describes some of the features of their pronunciation. Many of these features of pronunciation are found with speakers of English throughout China, but some are particularly prevalent in places such as Guangxi in southern China. The features that are described include use of [w] in place of /v/, omission of final consonants, confusion between non-initial /l/ and /r/, omission of dark /l/, a lack of distinction between long and short vowels, and the stressing of pronouns, and the paper focuses particularly on those features that give rise to misunderstandings when the speakers are talking to someone who originates from the UK.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Guangxi University, especially to Professor Song Yafei of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, for inviting me to visit them and also for facilitating the recordings. I am also grateful to the students for their patience and generosity in letting me record them and analyse their speech for this research.
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Deterding, D. (2017). The Pronunciation of English in Guangxi: Which Features Cause Misunderstandings?. In: Xu, Z., He, D., Deterding, D. (eds) Researching Chinese English: the State of the Art. Multilingual Education, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53110-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53110-6_2
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