Tracing the roots of phonetic variation in East Asian Englishes through loan phonology

One key aspect of Englishes in the Kachruvian Expanding Circle concerns phonetic features as they commonly bear traits of speakers’ native languages. This article explores language contact phenomena that are likely to cause L1>L2 phonological transfer, which underlies the phonetic specificity of English in East Asia. Drawing on the general theory of loan phonology, the author treats phonographic adaptation of English loanwords in East Asian languages compared to Russian, as a reliable source of data that supports research on the nature of phonetic variation in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian Englishes. The data were obtained through comparative analysis of English loanwords (200 for each language) selected from dictionary sources and speech samples from the Russian-Asian Corpus of English which was collected in earlier research. The findings confirm typological correlation of phonological transfer in loanword phonographic adaptation and in foreign language phonology. In both linguistic contexts, a crucial role is played by syllabic constraints, because being the fundamental unit of any phonological system, a syllable serves a domain of its segmental and suprasegmental features. Consequently, various resyllabification phenomena occur in English borrowings in the languages of East Asia whose phonological typology is distant from that of English; as a demonstration of this same conflict, the syllabic and, hence, rhythmic organization of East Asian Englishes tends to exhibit similar code-copying variation. The greater typological proximity of English and Russian syllable regulations leads to fewer manifestations of syllabic and rhythmic restructuring in both loanword adaptations and English spoken by native speakers of Russian.