Macao lies in the south-eastern coast of the People’s Republic of China and it had been a Portuguese colony for over 400 years. Macao has its sovereignty retuned to China and become a Special Administrative Region only since December 1999. Therefore, Chinese and Portuguese are still the two official languages in Macao. However, the vast majority of the population does not know or speak Portuguese at all. A form of the Chinese dialect - Cantonese - is the mother tongue of most people in this enclave and I am one of them.

Being a Cantonese speaker and an English teacher to mainly Cantonese students myself, I have come across many students with pronunciation problems and a lot of the problems, I believe, are related to their innate speech mechanism. As I am not a linguist myself, I will not go into each of the problems and offer my explanations. On the contrary, I will share my personal observations on some common ones below.

To replace an English phoneme with a similar Cantonese sound

Cantonese speakers cannot discriminate voiced and unvoiced syllables so they pronounce ‘b’ with no voice and ‘v’ will sound like ‘w’ e.g. ‘visor’ will become ‘wisor’. Likewise, there is no sound in Cantonese that requires the rolling of the tongue as the ‘r’ sound and this is, therefore, a major challenge for Cantonese learners. A lot of them pronounce the letter ‘r’ as ‘ah lo’ with a falling intonation. In pronouncing ‘r’ sound in a word, they tend to change the articulation to either ‘l’ or ‘w’ as in ‘sorry - sorly’ ‘ray - way’ and so on. Another problematic area concerning pronunciation is the ‘th’ sound. This is also due to the absence of such phoneme in Cantonese. Another hindrance for the correct pronunciation is embarrassment. Some students find it extremely uncomfortable to have to put their tongue out between their teeth to make such sound, and most of the time ‘th’ sound is replaced by ‘d’ as in ‘the’, ‘t’ as in ‘something’ or ‘f’ as in ‘thirsty’. When they come across /i/ or /i:/ used as the beginning sound, they tend to add an ‘y’ before them and so ‘ear’ and ‘year’ sound the same.

Hui Vai Ieng