Given that phonological characteristics could vary from different languages,speakers are likely to carry over the phonemic habits of their mother tongue into their second language,resulting in a particular and distinctive accent.This essay would give justifications to such proclivity by evaluating 'German Mother' in 'The Book Thief' who is a L1 speaker of German yet L2 speaker of English through contrastive analysis.
There are three phonological elements that are presented throughout the excerpt of the movie.The first one is the deliberate pronunciation of /ɹ /in English as /r/ in German before vowels ,as marked in 'dragging' (00:01:03), 'true'(00:01:12) and 'dressed'(00:03:21) .In fact ,such phenomenon results from the /ɹ / sound which is absent in the phonological system of German .By comparison of the IPA charts of English and German,it is the former one which possesses the alveolar approximant /ɹ /whereas the latter one only have the alveolar trill /r/ which is consonantal.Of interest to note,their mechanism of pronunciation is different in a way that/ɹ / is pronounced with the tongue
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With the above 3 different phonological elements mimicked by the German mother in her conversation,it is utterly explicit that mother tongue has posed great influence,if not interference,on the delivery and pronunciation of the second language,ultimately creating an accent.This usually results from the discrepancy of phonological system,such as an absent phoneme in mother language,close vowels and influence of spelling .Because of this,speakers are likely to utilise language transfer in which they apply former linguistic knowledge into their second language in bilingual condition out of habit in order to pronounce a word.Such tendency always comes in form of mispronunciation by using the wrong or non-existed phonemes in a language.In conclusion,mother language carries much importance to the acquisition of second language and affects how an individual speak the second