We explore two aspects of English spoken by native speakers of Thai: rhythm and the vowel system, and compare each to the substrate language Thai, to target varieties of English, and to two New Englishes in Asia. Data was collected from a group of Thai speakers who participated in an interview in English, and who read a Thai paragraph, and English words, sentences and a paragraph. For rhythm, we measured the “Pairwise Variability Index” (nPVI, Grabe and Low 2002) and the proportion of time in an utterance devoted to vowels (%V, Ramus, Nespor and Mehler 1999) of Thai read speech, and English spontaneous and read speech. We find that the English of Thai speakers had stress-timed values of high nPVI, like Thai and British English (BrE), and low %V, like BrE but not Thai. Neither measure of rhythm resembled New Englishes’ more syllable-timed lower nPVI and high %V. The vowel system of Thai English revealed transfers of both quality and quantity from the substrate, resulting in a system distinct from British, American, and New Englishes.
2024. Rhythm in the Kingdom: a variationist analysis of speech rhythm in Tongan English. English Language and Linguistics► pp. 1 ff.
Pillai, Stefanie, Anussyia Muthiah & Wan Ahmad Wan Aslynn
2023. Rhythmic Patterns of Malaysian English Speakers. In Speech Rhythm in Learner and Second Language Varieties of English [Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics, ], ► pp. 79 ff.
AlRawi, Maather, Nuha AlShurafa & Tariq Elyas
2022. Saudi English: A Descriptive Analysis of English Language Variations in Saudi Arabia. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 51:4 ► pp. 865 ff.
Kitikanan, Patchanok, Siti Syuhada Binte Faizal & Panuwit Mata
2022. An Impressionistic Study of British English Monophthongs Produced by L2 Thai Learners. English Teaching & Learning 46:4 ► pp. 355 ff.
Sewell, Andrew
2021. Functional Load and the Teaching-Learning Relationship in L2 Pronunciation. Frontiers in Communication 6
Knox, John S.
2019. Thais, Foreigners, and Englishes: Communicative Differences in Spoken Exchanges. In Discourses of Southeast Asia [The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series, ], ► pp. 165 ff.
Low, Ee Ling
2019. English in Southeast Asia. In The Handbook of World Englishes, ► pp. 135 ff.
Fuchs, Robert
2016. Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English. In Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English [Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics, ], ► pp. 87 ff.
Fuchs, Robert
2023. A Synthesis of Research on Speech Rhythm in Native, Learner and Second Language Varieties of English—Introduction to the Volume. In Speech Rhythm in Learner and Second Language Varieties of English [Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
Fuchs, Robert
2023. Rhythm Metrics and the Perception of Rhythmicity in Varieties of English as a Second Language. In Speech Rhythm in Learner and Second Language Varieties of English [Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics, ], ► pp. 187 ff.
2014. L2 ACQUISITION OF PROSODIC PROPERTIES OF SPEECH RHYTHM. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 36:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
Sharma, Devyani & Caroline R. Wiltshire
2012. Continua and clines in the development of New Englishes. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ► pp. 788 ff.
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