Intelligibility of the English Spoken by Ibbi Yemenis to Indians: A phonetic study

This article aims to investigate the intelligibility of the English spoken by Ibbi Yemenis to Indians. It provides an empirical account on the intelligibility of the English spoken by five Yemeni speakers from Ibb city, Yemen to ten Indian listeners both from south and north India. The study corpus consisted of 67 words read by the speakers and played back to the listeners. These words were recorded by an apple iPhone 5 voice memos recorder model A1428. Data analysis was both quantitative and qualitative. The study findings showed that the influence of Yemeni Arabic dialect impeded the correct pronunciation of specific English phonemes in the speaker’s speech samples, thereby hindering the international intelligibility of their spoken English. The intelligibility of the five Yemeni speakers was below expectations, with only one speaker scoring 50% while the four others scored below this percentage. Other factors hindering the intelligibility of the English spoken by Ibbi Yemenisincluded listener familiarity with English varieties and interlocutors. Grounded on the listeners’ feedback, this study presents strategies to improve the intelligibility of spoken English among Yemeni learners originating from dialect-specific regions, thereby fostering the improvement of their communicative skills and enhancing their confidence when engaging with global audiences.