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Why do the majority of Arabs have a difficult time differentiating between the letter (P) & (B) when speaking?
The reason is regarded to the ''Mother Tongue Interference'' and the influence of L1 while learning English language. The /p/ and /b/ sounds are two different phonemes in English, and they can be easily distinguished by a native speaker. In Arabic, the situation is different, because there is only the phoneme /b/. Thus, this is the reason why most Arabs mispronounce words with these sounds /p/ and /b/.
Therefore, Arabs get confusion between /p/ and /b/, e.g., words like (‘park’,‘bark’), (‘pen’, ‘ben’), (‘pull’,‘bull’), (‘supper’, ‘subber’). If they were asked to articulate these words, they would pronounce /b/ instead of /p/ in each pair of the words above, and sometimes /p/ is used in the place of /b/, but this rarely happens. The reason for shifting from /p/ to /b/ is the fact that the two sounds are regarded as they are two allophones of one phoneme.
It has been found that Arab students of English confuse between /p/ and /b/, and that is linked to the influence of the mother tongue, so their tongues get stiff with their LI sounds. Hence, they commit such errors until the mastery of L2 sounds.
Professor. Dr. Abdulghani Al-Shuaibi
Phonetician & Phonologist Expert.
Community College of Qatar
I'd like to answer for this quetion
I think every people have onwer culture and accent langauge, they used some voels owner for them, the adults people they practiec on accent vowels they not easlly lean or immediately demand from them new from them, let's say another nation also have difficulties for learing another languages, let's say the engilish peoples can they pronouced the ط,ح?i think it's dificult for them unless they practice on it.
Simply because they don't have such sound in their own language. Besides, it sounds so similar to the /b/ sound which confuse them. On the top of that teachers in Egypt don't pronounce it correctly or stress the correct way of pronouncing it.
Dear Sara
Thank you very much indeed to drop me a line concerning of your question ' Why do the majority of Arabs have a difficult time differentiating between the letter /P/ & /B/ when speaking?.
First of all Arabic doesn't belong to Ind-European Languages which have the specific qualities to recognise between /P/ & /B/ and some others. Both phonemes are 'Bilabial' and their Manner of Articulation 'Stop voiceless voiced'. Arabic is a 'Semitic Language which is completely different of Indo-European Languages with different utterances and pronunciations. That's to say, each language a specific linguistic structures differ of others.
