Have you ever wondered
why people have weird accents,

when they speak
foreign languages?

When linguists study the
pronunciation of foreign languages,

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.

Normal people don’t do that.

Instead, when they
study foreign languages,

they convert the text
into whatever framework –

that they are already
familiar with.

For example, consider this
simple English sentence.

“What is that?”

When Finnish speakers read that,

they don’t think
“what is that”.

If they have
no experience about English,

they might read it
as vhat-is-that.

But let’s assume they do know
how English text is read aloud.

They think: Vot is tät?

Finnish has no
phoneme for W,

so they would substitute
a regular V for it.

When Japanese speakers read it,
they think: ヲット・イズ・ザット

The same phenomenon happens
between any two languages.

Consider this Finnish sentence:
“kävin eilen kaupassa.”

An American-English speaker,

trying their best
to repeat in their mind –

the sounds that I just spoke,

might put it into
this form:

“Kevin aylen cowpassah.”

[ Even the dog laughs at this. ]

My own name is a
particularly good example.

It goes like this:
/ˈjoelˈʔyliˌluomɑ/

My best attempt at putting it
into English orthography –

looks like this:
yoh-el u-lee-loo-oh-mah

And that does not sound
anything like the original!

A Japanese person would be
a bit more successful –

at pronouncing my
name correctly:
 
ヨエル・ウリルオマ

But it’s still far off
from the original.

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.