English nasal consonants in the pronunciation of Polish learners

Abstract

Most English dictionaries as well as popular handbooks of English phonetics for Polish learners, e.g. BAŁUTOWA (1974), JASSEM (1971), RESZKIEWICZ (1984), ARABSKI (1987), SOBKOWIAK (2001) traditionally distinguish three nasal consonants. Two of them, i.e. the bilabial and the alveolar are usually neglected in pronunciation courses for Poles as they are regarded similar enough to their Polish counterparts both in perception and articulation, including their positional allophones. The velar nasal, conversely, is considered one of the most serious problems in learning English pronunciation, even though the differences between Polish and English consonantal systems might seem slightly exaggerated. After all, in both languages the status of the velar nasal is not obviously phonemic. The appearance of the sound is rather a result of positional flexibility of the alveolar nasal1. The sound regularly appears if /n/ is followed by a velar plosive, sometimes even across morpheme boundaries, where the assimilation is optional (e.g. in western and southern Polish dziewczynka, konkurencja or English ‘conclude’, ‘inconvenient’). Besides, in Polish the velar nasal also appears as partial realisation of nasal vowels represented by <ą> and <ę> in spelling. Still, probably all examples in the two languages (except certain French borrowings) display an indication of a velar plosive in their spelling. The restricted distribution of the velar nasal and the fact that it is not as such represented in spelling, which mustn’t be ignored in phonological considerations, are clearly arguments against the phonemic status of the consonant in question.