English Obstruents as spoken by Telugu speakers:An analysis

In India, English is the language that is taught on a large scale for academic or in a majority of instances for employability and pre-service training. An efficient speaker is believed to have the ability to discriminate between sounds and the ability to remember the acoustic qualities of the sounds and recognize the sounds with ease and certainty. This will help learners learn the language more efficiently and accurately. Most Indian languages have a very phonetic pronunciation with respect to their script, unlike English, as the spelling of a word in Indian languages is a highly reliable guide to its pronunciation. The aim of the project was to study and describe the obstruent sounds of “Telugu English” in terms of its articulation as well as its acoustic dimensions. All the seventeen obstruent sounds of English were analysed in all word positions and connected speech in terms of duration, frequency and intensity acoustically using speech software - Wave surfer. The articulatory description of the same was based on perception.