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Abstract

This study aims to heed the call of giving importance to the creative aspects of first language interference in oral English communication. It contends that languages have their own distinct features but this does not mean inferiority or superiority to another. The suprasegmental features of the Philippine English Variety as spoken in the southern towns of Cebu are identified to examine the aspects of first language interference in speaking English. An investigation on the distinct suprasegmental features of the southern Cebuano Variation was first identified and compared to the standard. Results indicated that the Southern Cebuano Variation was spoken with a sing-song twang. This was characterized with a strong emphasis on the last syllable of most words, especially when they were used in a sentence. Further, findings revealed that the distinct prosodic features of the L1 studied did not significantly affect the respondents’ English prosody despite the obvious disparity of both languages. The phonological interference identified was phonemic, not prosodic. Therefore, the L1 interferences in stress, pitch and intonation do not have a significant influence on the suprasegmental features of the Filipino English variety spoken in the southern municipalities of Cebu. The prosodic interferences identified were not noteworthy enough to swerve speakers from the standard. In an attempt to explain such phenomenon, Flege’s Merger hypothesis claims that the merging of phonetic properties of phones impact both the first language and the target language (Lott, 2012). As speakers become invariably influenced by L2, they may experience phonological modifications. Hence, while one think that acquiring new phoneme(s) will be more difficult than rearranging the two existing sounds from allophones of the same phoneme to separate phonemes, research has proven otherwise (Major and Kim qtd. in Yavas, 2011). This study concluded that inclination for prosodic interference was higher when the structures or sounds were similar in L1 and L2 than when they were dissimilar. This study recommends further investigation of the phonemic structure of the Cebuano-Visayan Southern Variety.

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