Consistency of cross-lingual pronunciation of South African personal names

Abstract

The authors investigate the consistency with which speakers with different language profiles are able to pronounce personal names from Afrikaans, English, Setswana and isiZulu. They gather data in a controlled research study and analyse cross-lingual pronunciation effects. They find that speakers with a similar primary language tend to agree on the ‘correct’ pronunciation of a name originating from their own language community, and that the ability of speakers from other language communities to approximate this pronunciation is highly dependent on the speaker-word language pair. They also find that there are systematic ways in which names are ‘mis-pronounced’ by different language communities: understanding such systematicity could be important when extending electronic pronunciation dictionaries (used in spoken dialogue systems) with the most important variants that occur in practice, in order to increase the accuracy of name recognition.