Pronunciation in Vietnam

While I was in Vietnam this past week, I was struck by a feature of the local pronunciation of English. They tend to omit the final consonant in the following words:

house, rice, nice, size, five

However, the final consonant tends to be produced in words such as these:

bus, please, because, yes, have

What can explain this phenomenon? At first glance, it seems just random: the final consonant is omitted in some words but not others. However, actually it is possible to find a rule that captures the pattern: the vowel in the first set of words is a diphthong (consisting of two qualities, either [au] or [ai]) while the second set of words have monophthongs (so the vowel only has a single quality ‒ the vowel does not change much during its duration, no matter how slowly it is spoken).

This is because in Vietnamese, a diphthong can never be followed by a consonant. Final consonants do occur, but only after monophthongs. And this affects their pronunciation of English.

Actually, the same is found in Malay: in the syllable structure of Malay, a diphthong cannot be followed by a consonant. (We need to think about this a bit further, as it suggests that words such as baik ('good'), kain ('cloth') and kaum ('tribe') have two syllables. I will discuss this in a later blog.)

I would expect to find that the English of non-proficient speakers of the language in Brunei exhibits final consonant omission more often after diphthongs than monophthongs; but I will have to get more data to confirm if this is true or not.