Mispronunciation: why you should stop correcting people’s mistakes

Mispronunciation Blog 

By: Camila Yengle


    A recent study with 2,000 adults in the Uk showed that 65% of them felt annoyed with mispronunciation but a

majority of them felt uncomfortable with actually confronting/calling out the people in public. The person who

wrote this article is a Phonetician who studies the way people make speech sounds and pronunciation.

  Some examples that the author of the article gave of words being changed through mispronunciation is the word

espresso. People often say the word espresso with a z (expresso) even though that's not how you spell it. This way

of mispronunciation also occurs a lot in young children who are just learning to speak. This mispronunciation

comes from a process called weak syllable elision or deletion. When adults speak faster, syllable elision also occurs.

For example the word memory people often pronounce as memry. Language mispronunciation can also form from the

influence of other speakers around you. The article goes on to explain that correcting pronunciation can be an act of

linguistic prejudice because a lot of the time when non native speakers speak a language its understandable for them

not to have perfect pronunciation. I partly disagree and partly agree with this statement because if we never correct

people for their mispronunciations they'll never learn that what they're saying might be wrong. 


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