Foreign (a) in North American English: Variation and Change in Loan Phonology

Abstract

Previous research has shown that Canadian English displays a unique pattern of nativizing the stressed vowel of foreign words spelled with the letter <a>, like lava, pasta, and spa, known as foreign (a), with more use of /æ/ (the trap vowel) and less use of /ah/ (the palm vowel) than American English. This paper analyzes one hundred examples of foreign (a), produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American English-speakers, in order to shed more light on this pattern and its current development. Acoustic analysis is used to determine whether each participant assigns each vowel to English /æ/, /ah/, or an intermediate category between /æ/ and /ah/. It reports that the Canadian pattern, though still distinct, is converging with the American pattern, in that Canadians now use slightly more /ah/ than /æ/; that men appear to lead this change but this is because they participate less than women do in the Short Front (Canadian) Vowel Shift; that intermediate vowel assignments are comparatively rare, suggesting that a new low-central vowel phoneme is not emerging; that the Canadian tendency toward American pronunciation is not well aligned with overt attitudes toward the United States and American English; and that the national differences in foreign (a) assignment result not from structural, phonological differences between the dialects so much as from a complex set of sociocultural factors.

Shared Vowels in English Loanwords in Arabic: Variation in Similarity-Based Adaptation

“…In general, the process of adaptation is based on similarity and how categories can be distinguished from one another by L1 native speakers (i.e., borrowers). Nonetheless, the issue of how adaptation of loanwords is triggered by the requirements of conformity to the recipient language system is a matter of substantial research on a number of various languages in the literature (e.g., Silverman, 1992;Davis, 1994;Yip, 2002;Haunz, 2004;LaCharité and Paradis, 2005;Davis and Cho, 2006;Miao, 2006;Kenstowicz, 2007;Lee, 2009;Kang, 2011;Paradis and LaCharité, 2011;Tu, 2013;Guba, 2016;Natvig, 2017;Boberg, 2020;Alahmari, 2021). In order to account for adaptation in the study of loanwords, phonologists and phoneticians have proposed different models that can be generally classified into two major approaches: the phonological approach and the phonetic approach.…”