Spanish (Colombian) accent by Daniella Puerta & Umama Khan
Channel: Phonetics Accent Authority
Date: 2015-04-23

For our phonetic group project, we interview Tio Negro. Tio Negro has been in america for 28 years. He is a very interesting man, for example when we interviewed him he had no problem hiding his accent, he acknowledges the fact that he has a thick accent but does not hinder it at all. In fact, he embraces it, and embraces his culture. Tio Negro is a man you would describe as a confident and easygoing man. After we interview Tio Negro, we found five key phonetic elements in his speech. 
      During the interview we notice that instead of saying "the" he pronounced it as "da" the "ð" changes to "d". This is known as Stopping, the substitution of a stop for a fricative or affricate.  
      Next, while Tio Negro was reading Limpy. instead of saying "fuzzy" he says "foozy". This is know as Vowel Reduction, when a vowel becomes more like a mid-central vowel. He as well used Elision, that is when a phoneme is eliminated during production due to a particular phonetic context. Here Tio Negro instead of saying "or" he drops the "r" and says "o". 
       Lastly, in Tio Negro's speech we found weak syllable deletion, which involves omission of an unstressed syllable following a stressed syllable. He replaces the "y" in "yellow" and says "Jellow" adding a "j" in replace of "y". He as well uses Final Consonant Deletion, effectively reduced a syllable to a CV pattern, that us an open syllable. Here Tio Negro drops the "d" in "pond" and just said "pon".
       Overall, it was a pleasure interviewing Tio Negro, and in this project we learned a lot. It gave us a hand on feeling of how being a speech pathologist is like. More importantly, taught us to identify different phonetic elements that can be found in speech.