In the preparatory class for the Mauritius field trip, students practised reading aloud dialogues and phrases in Mauritius Creole. We were all using the same Frew��s book with a phonetic orthography, and our instructor Dr. Matthews did the demonstration from time to time. Yet, sometimes we still did not pronounce words in the same way and committed pronunciation mistakes. At times, we hesitated while racking our brain in a bid to work out pronunciation from what was on Frew��s book. It was clear that the pronunciations deviating from the correct ones were the results of different individual interpretation of how sounds should be related to writing on Frew��s book. The previous chapter of this project has suggested an approach to decode pronunciation from orthography. This chapter will feature the different types of mispronunciation recorded in the field trip class and their possible causes. I hope that this chapter has reinforced the previous one by giving actual examples of mispronunciation.

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As have been discussed in much space before, the confusion of ��n�� in orthography is clearly the top culprit leading to incorrect pronunciation. It was often the case in the class that ��n�� was not correctly recognized as a signal of nasalization. An interesting example is the word manyer in the second example �V ��n�� should be the onset of the second syllable instead of marking nasalization in the first syllable; the following ��y�� might have created confusion in syllabification. Examples:

(Please click each example to listen to the recording from the class. The word concerned is in bold type in each heading below. [Square brackets] are narrow transcriptions, as opposed to /slants/ for broad transcriptions, to denote actual pronunciation.)

1. Bonzur. Ki nuvel?

Incorrect pronunciation: *[bon.zuʁ]; Correct pronunciation: /bɔ̃.zuʁ/

2. Bonzur. Ki manyer? (Please also refer to Example 6 in Chapter 3.)

Incorrect pronunciation: *[mɑ̃.jeʁ]; Correct pronunciation: /ma.njeʁ/

3. Mo bizin al labutik.

Incorrect pronunciation: *[bi.zin]; Correct pronunciation: /bi.zɛ̃/

4. To anvi enn gato.

Incorrect pronunciation: *[an.vi]; Correct pronunciation: /ɑ̃.vi/

5. Swasant Rupee sinkant.

Incorrect pronunciation: *[sin.kɑ̃t]; Correct pronunciation: /sɛ̃.kɑ̃t/

6. Mo al laplaz sak dimans. (Please also refer to Example 5 in Chapter 3.)

Incorrect pronunciation: *[di.man]; Correct pronunciation: / di.mɑ̃s/

Possible cause:

Students who do not know French were not familiar with the form ��vowel letter + n�� meaning a nasal vowel, and neither Cantonese nor English has nasal vowels as phonemes. This proposition may be supported by the fact that students who are also French majors encountered little difficulty in producing the correct nasal vowels.

Advice for learners of Mauritian Creole:

Knowledge of syllable structure in Mauritian Creole and familiarity in the Maximum Onset Principle should greatly help recognize nasal vowels. A quick tip is that ��n�� means /n/ ONLY IF it is an onset (but NEVER a coda). If /n/ has to be a coda, it must be ��nn��.

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As in second language learning, one often substitutes difficult sounds of L2 by similar sounds from L1 or from other languages which one has already spoken. This phenomenon also occurred in the field trip class. Another one is interference of an alphabetically written language. Some words in Mauritian Creole may look like English words whose pronunciations are incorrectly regarded as those of the Mauritian Creole words concerned.

4.2.1 Replacing /ʁ/ by /ɹ/ or /l/

7. Marie-Michelle byen?

Incorrect pronunciation: *[ma.ɹi]; Correct pronunciation: /ma.ʁi/

8. To pena travay zordi? [�K] Ah, bon! Rantre!

Incorrect pronunciation: *[tla.vaj], *[lɑ̃.tle];

Correct pronunciation: /tʁa.vaj/, /ʁɑ̃.tʁe/

4.2.2 Interference from English words

9. Kan to pu ale? (English grammatical word ��to��)

Incorrect pronunciation: *[tu]; Correct pronunciation: /to/

10. Ki manyer bann zanfan? (English word ��fan��)

Incorrect pronunciation: *[zɑ̃.fen]; Correct pronunciation: /zɑ̃.fɑ̃/

Possible cause:

As mentioned at the beginning of this part, substitution of sounds by similar ones present in languages which one knows is commonplace in second language learning. Here ��similar�� sounds mean they are phonetically similar (e.g. with the same place of articulation but different manners of articulation, or vice versa) to those in the target language. Even if a learner is aware of the problem, substitution may still persist since it does not cause much confusion in communication (and the learner may just have a strange accent). As for the influence of English words, since Mauritian Creole is written with an alphabetical writing system, which looks like English in some way, and that students in Hong Kong are most familiar only with one alphabetical writing system (that of English), there is possibility that one may incorrectly pronounce Mauritian Creole words which orthographically resemble those in English.

Advice for learners of Mauritian Creole:

It is interesting that ��r�� across many of the world��s languages realizes itself in a large range of phonetic varieties. As Dr. Matthews has noted in the field trip class, among speakers in Mauritius themselves they may have different versions of ��r��. Further, [ɹ] as the English ��r�� is phonetically distinctive from other phonemes in Mauritian Creole. Therefore, I believe that if a speaker uses [ɹ] as the Mauritian Creole ��r��, there should not be any big trouble in general.

However, as for the problem illustrated in 4.2.2, interference from English words should be avoided as far as possible. The two illustrations, for example, show replacement of sounds by those which exist (or are phonetically very close to sounds) in Mauritian Creole. In this case, mispronunciation may trigger changes in meaning (due to changes in phonemes as perceived by the listerner) and hence confusion in communication. Once again, knowing how words in Mauritian Creole are pronounced is important.

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Mispronunciation recorded in the field trip class is not confined to what has been discussed above. Nonetheless, many mistakes were due to rather individual pronunciation habits (e.g. someone might replace /e/ by /a/ from time to time) and are difficult to categorize and discuss in a systematical and meaningful way. What has been discussed above is what I find to be more systematic, recurrent and regular mistakes in the recordings.

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