1. i
Abstract
With the rising of English in many countries mainly results from historical
colonialism, Malaysia has established a as non-native variety of English, Malaysian
English (MalE) or colloquially ‘Manglish’, with complex structures influenced by the
local languages spoken in the multiracial and multilingual society. From the
perspective of sociophonetics, this paper aims to provide an insightful analysis of the
phonetic variation of initial stop consonants in MalE by examining the influence of
Malay on the localised English. This study is carried out by comparing the similarities
and differences of the acoustic measurements, voice onset time (VOT), of stop
consonants in the word-initial position produced by 6 Malay-English bilinguals and 6
English monolinguals. Based on the data collected from recording, the VOT values are
extracted and presented in tables and boxplots to explore the degree of influence of
Malay in the acquisition of English voicing contrast in Malay-English bilinguals as
well as the governance of place of articulation of initial stop consonants in MalE. The
findings indicates the strong influence of Malay in the acquisition of English as a
second language for Malay-English bilinguals due to long-term language contact and
cross-language interference. To conclude, this paper supports the view that first
language acts a filter during the language transfer process in the second language
acquisition considering the social and linguistic factors, and thus forms the phonetic
variation in the voicing contrast of bilingual speakers.
Keywords: non-native varieties of English, Malaysian English, VOT, bilingualism,
language contact