Acquiring angma: The velar nasal in advanced learners’ English

Abstract

The English velar nasal, known as angma or engma, belongs to consonants that are most difficult to master by Poles, in spite of the fact that this sound occurs also in Polish as a result of the assimilation of the dental nasal to the following velar plosives (e.g. in tango ‘tango’ pronounced as [ltangO]). It is problematic for Polish learners, however, in other contexts, i.e. word-finally, as in bring, before vowels, as in singer, and before non-velars, as in strongly, where the velar nasal is pronounced with a following velar plosive. This paper examines the acquisition of the velar nasal by 60 advanced/proficient Polish learners of English, students at the English Department of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. The realization of angma is scrutinized with a view to uncovering regularities in its acquisition by the participants, establishing their success rate and the degree of difficulty in the production of the velar nasal in each of the three problematic contexts. The obtained results are compared with those pertaining to students’ acquisition of ash, schwa and unstressed unreduced vowels in order to characterize advanced learners’ interlanguage in more detail. The presented observations carry important pedagogical implications for the phonetic training of Poles.