Vietnamese uses almost all the speech parts shown in the diagram of speech physiology in the reading on page 22 except for the dental. It also has plosive (bilabial b and p, alveolar t, d, and tʰ, retroflex t, palatal c, and velar k and g), nasal (bilabial m, alveolar n, palatal ɲ, and velar ŋ), trill (alveolar r), fricative (labiodental f and v, alveolar s and z, postalveolar ʃ and ʒ, velar x, and glottal h), glides (palatal j and velar w), and liquid (alveolar l) sounds. There are also many sounds in Vietnamese that do not exist in American English and vice versa. English has sounds such as θ, ð, ʧ, and ʤ that are not found in Vietnamese. Likewise, Vietnamese has sounds such as tʰ, ʈ, c, ɲ, ɣ, x, ɽ, ʐ, ɯ, and ɤ that are not used in English. Some examples of words in their phonetic transcriptions would be
ɲɔ˨˩˦ (small), ʈəːj˨˩ ʔəːj˧˧ (god/sky), and ɹaŋ ɹɔj˨˩˦ (already firm/strong). Additionally, due to dialectal variations, there are phonemes that only occur in some dialects such as z in the Northern dialect and j, r, and ʃ in the Central and Southern dialects. As I am a heritage speaker, I've already acquired the ability to discriminate differentiated segments in my listening and know how to produce these sounds, but I could listen to more dialectal variations to familiarize with the slight differences in pronunciation between them. Some useful websites with diagrams showing Vietnamese phonemics are https://www.asha.org/uploadedFiles/practice/multicultural/VietnamesePhonemicInventory.pdf, https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1085&context=jsaaea, and https://bilinguistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Difference-vs-Disorder-Vietnamese.pdf.
Comments