Can we speak of an Algerian english pronunciation

Abstract

Proficiency in language is essential to professional life, and teaching English as a Foreign Language tends to target more morpho-syntactic structures and lexical-semantic units than phonetic realisations. In Algeria, English is taught from Middle School to Secondary School for seven years, a period ranging between 750 and 830 hours. Whether learners have followed a literary or scientific stream, they reach university with an English pronunciation, upon which a Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI) from Standard Arabic, Colloquial Algerian Arabic, Berber and French could be depicted. In order to identify the validity of such a statement, the pronunciation of 80 first-year students was audiotaped at the English Department of Oran University 2. This paper discusses the findings of the conducted study so as to identify whether the informants’ repeated phonemic/phonetic deviations in English reveal an Algerian English pronunciation. The objective of this work is mainly to understand Algerian learners of English, to help them avoid unintelligibility and to investigate the linguistic aspects that may trigger a particular realisation instead of another.