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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