Common English Pronunciation Errors Made by Spanish Native Speakers

If your mother tongue is Spanish, you may find certain sounds in English more difficult than others. Here we present to you the most common errors made by Spanish native speakers when they learning English as a Foreign Language.

1. Vowel Sound Positions: Spanish uses 5 vowel sound positions in pronunciation, but English uses 12 vowel sound positions – so this is a key area for Spanish speakers to learn. The most important area is making the right shape with the mouth, rather than focussing on the length of the sound:

• hit/heat

Spanish has just one high front vowel [i] and Spanish speakers often use this vowel for both the /ɪ/ vowel in HIT and the /iː/ vowel in HEAT. One ‘i’ in English is normally the lower /ɪ/ vowel:

hit/heat

Did this thing win?

hut/hat/heart

Spanish speakers often make the vowels in HUT /hʌt/, HAT /hæt/ and HEART /hɑːt/ into the Spanish /a/

• world

The central, neutral vowel /ɜː/ in HURT, EARLY, BIRD, WORSE, PREFER is often mispronounced by Spanish speakers because there is no similar vowel sound in the Spanish, and the spellings are confusing:

‘ir’ bird, shirt, sir

‘or’ worse, worth, world

‘ur’ hurt, turn, burn

‘er/ear’ prefer, heard, early

• good/food

Spanish /u/ is made with the tongue at the back of the mouth, English /uː/ in FOOD is more central, and English /ʊ/ in GOOD is more open and central (note also that the spelling < oo > can produce both sounds in English)

/uː/ food, soon, new
/ʊ/ good, cook, put

I’ll cook some good food soon.

2. /v/ vs. /b/

In English /v/ is a voiced fricative using teeth and lip, Spanish speakers tend to replace it with a plosive /b/ or an approximant sound using both lips:

• Next vacation I'd love to visit the river.

3. /ʃ/ vs /s/

Spanish speakers don’t tend to pull the tongue back when making the /ʃ/ sound, so it sounds more like /s/:

• /ʃ/ push sharp fashion

4. /h/ & silent < h >

English /h/ is a glottal fricative – it’s the sound you make when steaming up a mirror. Spanish speakers may replace this with a velar fricative:

• /h/ horse heavy ahead

The ‘h’ in little function words like HAVE, HE, HIS, HER, HIM is often silent in connected speech, but Spanish speakers may put it in:

• I must have forgotten it. 
• What’s her name?

5. Voicing

• Spanish speakers often de-voice (/d/=/t/, /b/=/p/, /v/=/f/) at the end of syllables, as the distinction is not made in Spanish:

bad cod job love

• The spelling ‘s’ is often pronounced as voiced /z/ at the end of syllables in English, Spanish speakers tend to always pronounce it as voiceless /s/:

The cheese was news lose.