[slide 1]
Have you ever wondered why people have weird accents
when they speak foreign languages?

When linguists study the pronunciation of foreign languages,
	[slide 2]
they use the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA,
which seeks to convey sufficiently accurately
how any word, of *any language*, is pronounced.

However, that’s linguists.

	[slide 3]
Normal people don’t do that.
Instead, when they study foreign languages,
they convert the text into whatever framework
they are already familiar with.

	[slide 4]
For example, consider this simple English sentence.
[pronounce it]

        what is that?		/ˈhwɒtɪzˈðæt/

When Finnish speakers read that,
they don’t think “what is that”.
	[slide 5]
They think [pronounce it]:

        vot is tät?             /ˈʋotisˈtæt/

	[slide 6]
Or, if they have no experience
about how English, they might
read it as vat-is-that instead.
	vhat is that?      	/ʋɦɑtˈʔisˈtxɑt/
Finnish has no phoneme for double-w,
so they would substitute a regular v for it.
But let’s assume they do know how English text is read aloud.

	[slide 7]
When Japanese speakers read it,
they think [pronounce it]:

        ヲット・イズ・ザット     /ˈɰot̚.oˈizuˈzät̚.o/

	[slide 8]
The same phenomenon happens between any two languages.
Consider this Finnish sentence [pronounce it]:

	kävin eilen kaupassa.   /ˈkæʋinˈeilenˈkɑupɑsːɑ/

An American-English speaker,
trying their best
to repeat in their mind
the sounds that I just spoke,
	[slide 9]
might put it into this form [pronounce it]:

	kevin aylen cowpassah.  /ˈkʰɛvəneɪlənkʰaʊˈpʰasə/

	[slide 10]
My own name is a particularly good example.
It goes like this [pronounce it]:

	Joel Yliluoma, /ˈjoelˈʔyliˌluomɑ/

My best attempt at putting it into English orthography
looks like this [pronounce it].
	[slide 11]

	yoh-el u-lee-loo-oh-mah	/ˈjəʊˈɛlˈjuːliːluːəʊmɑː/

And that does not sound anything like the original!
	[alternate between the two samples]

	[slide 12]
A Japanese person would be a bit more successful
at pronouncing my name correctly [pronounce it]:

	ヨエル・ウリルオマ	/joeɾɯᵝ ɯᵝɾʲiɾɯᵝoma/

But it’s still far off from the original.
	[repeat original sound, then repeat Japanese]

Aside from a few exceptions,
there is just no possible way
to accurately present the true pronunciation of any language
by using the orthography of another language.

But people do it anyway, and they do it always, subconsciously.
This just happens.
That’s people, like you and me.

There are also other factors
to accents of course,
but this is the most prominent example
that is easiest to explain.

We will be touching this subject again in a future video.
Have a nice day.