A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF PHILIPPINE ENGLISH

A brief description of Philippine English Nguyen Thanh Binh
In general, the Philippine English phonology is not different from that of American English.
However, there are still some acceptable differences in allophones. Philippine English is rhotic,
meaning that the Filipinos always pronounce the sound “r” after a vowel similar to Scottish or
American English since it is based on the American phonology. Some consonants such as /d, t,
l, n/ have a dental articulation rather than an alveolar one (Millward and Hayes, 2011).
Moreover, there are some sounds which never exist in Philippine phonological system such as
interdental /ð/ and /θ/. These two sounds are often pronounced /d/ and /t/ so than and thanks are
spoken as /dæn/ and /tænks/. Like /ð/ and /θ/, /v/ and /f/ is not existent in most of the native
languages, so they are often replaced with /b/ and /p/ like vase pronounced as /bɑː z/ and fence
pronounced as /pens/ though some native minorities that have little contact with Spanish will
have more correction that the others. Interestingly, some people even have a hypercorrection
that they pronounce all words beginning with /b/ and /p/ as /v/ and /f/. Due to great influence
from Spanish, the pronunciation of some sounds is just like Spanish. For example, stream,
stress and strong with the paired consonants /st/ at the beginning are usually spoken as
istream/estream, istress/estress, istrong/estrong. In addition, some similar vowels are usually
treated with the same pronunciation. For example, it will be very difficult for a person to
distinguish between these minimal pairs: feel / fill, full / fool, top / tap. The diphthong /əʊ / is
also spoken as /o:/ so phone will be spoken as /fo:n/ rather than /fəʊ n/. Philippine English is
also considered syllable-timed rather than stress-timed. Therefore, instead of pronouncing the
unstressed syllables as a schwa, the Filipinos tend to pronounce them with even beats just like
stressed syllables. This reflects “the fact that Filipinos typically learn English from books rather
than from native speakers of the language” and “through reading or dictionary work than from
conversation with Americans” (Thompson, 2003, p.52-53). The typical examples are the
pronunciations of these sounds establísh, diplomatícally, cemetéry, and necessáry. Gonzalez
(1997, p.32-33) suggests the tables of the vowel and consonant sounds of cultivated Philippine
English as follows:
The vowel and consonant sounds of cultivated Philippine English
1 | P a g e