Pronunciation Respelling For English - Pronunciation Respelling Systems in Dictionaries For English-language Learners

Pronunciation Respelling Systems in Dictionaries For English-language Learners

For many English language learners, particularly learners without easy Internet access, dictionary pronunciation respelling are the only source of pronunciation information for most new words. Which respelling systems are best for such learners has been a matter of debate. One important difference between the traditional respelling systems and the IPA is that the former contain information about the English writing system and the latter does not. Traditional respellings help learners to generalize about the regularities of English spelling. For example, the traditional respelling of "read", past tense, is "red", which exemplifies a common spelling pattern. On the other hand, because it uses different symbols, the IPA merely adds to the vocabulary of known words from which learners may infer the regularities of the spelling system.

In countries where the local languages are written in non-Latin, phonemic orthographies, various other respelling systems have been used. In India, for example, many English bilingual dictionaries provide pronunciation respellings in the local orthography. This is the case for several Indian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, and Tamil. To reduce the potential distortions of bilingual phonemic transcription, some dictionaries add English letters to the local-script respellings to represent sounds not specified in the local script. For example, in English-Tamil dictionaries, the sounds /b/ and /z/ need to be specified, as in this respelling of "busy": "bபிzஸி."

Because these respellings primarily use symbols already known to anyone with minimal literacy in the local language, they are more practical to use in such contexts than the IPA or the Latin respelling systems with diacritics. Another advantage of local-script respellings for English learners is that they retain the "flavour" of local English speech, allowing learners to make connections between their spoken and written English experiences. However, these systems also have limitations. One limitation is that they do not illuminate the English writing system. Like the IPA, they represent phonemes differently from the ways in which the phonemes are normally spelled. So these notations do not guide readers to infer the regularities of English spelling. Also, the practicality of these systems for learning English locally may be offset by difficulties in communication that could arise in the context of other pronunciation norms such as GA or RP.