Amy’s language development: /fl/

[pne]

One thing I’ve noticed very recently is that Amy has started (within the last couple of days) pronouncing /fl/ as [fl].

For years before, she had pronounced it as [ɬ] instead (like Welsh ll or the second part of Klingon tlh; sounds like thl to some English speakers). So she’d say ɬannel, butterɬy, ɬower, etc.

On the one hand, I’m glad that her pronunciation is approaching the norm in this point; on the other hand, I hope that she doesn’t forget how to make the [ɬ] sound; it’s a fun little phone to have in one’s inventory :)

In other language development news: her (inter)dental fricatives [θ, ð] (English voiced and voiceless th) are still only occasionally there.

Those sounds don’t have a consistent replacement the way /fl/ did; she’ll say tank you but I’m taking a barf and (I think) mudder, farder, brudder.

Comments

[pauamma]

You're raising her bilingual? It sounds like there might be some interference between the sounds of English and German equivalent words. (Sez he with zero knowledge of German phonology.)

[pne]

You're raising her bilingual?

I am.

It sounds like there might be some interference between the sounds of English and German equivalent words.

Hm, not sure, though it's possible.

I'm pretty sure that German phonology as a whole is responsible for one or two things about her pronunciation, such as the fact that she doesn't consistently distinguish between the two allophones of English /l/ - she sometimes doesn't use the "dark L" appropriately, because that phone doesn't exist in German, which uses the "light L" in all positions.

Interestingly, perhaps, her substitutions for "th" are not the ones usually used by native German speakers, who fairly consistently map it to [s] or [z] (depending on voicing). So in that sense, I'm a bit proud of her; apparently, not only are [θ, ð] among the last sounds to be acquired by monolingual English children, but substitutions such as [f] are common there. So she's doing the same thing as monolingual English children, and not the same thing as German adults learning English, which is "good" :)

As to the distribution of her variants, I suppose it's possible that German cognates are an influence. (FWIW, in this case the cognates would be danke, Bad*/baden, Mutter, Vater, Bruder. * = Bad ends in /d/ which is pronounced [t] due to German regular word-final consonant devoicing. Perhaps not all that different to the modern English pair "bath"/"bathe", where the voiced consonant is only in the verb.)