Effects of The British and American Accents on The Pronunciation of English Loan Words in Persian

This study aimed to explain the effects that the British and American accents have had on the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian within the framework of Optimality Theory and based on the Phonological Stance model. In other words, this research which was conducted in the area of loan word phonology, aimed at determining to what extent these two accents affected the input of English loan words, as well as coming up with an answer to the question “To which English accent is the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian closer? To this end, four important differences between British and American accents i.e., the pronunciation of /r/, /oU/, /A/, and /j/ that could have affected the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian were scrutinized to figure out what phonological processes have occurred and what constraints (rankings) caused the application and non-application of these processes. The findings of the present paper indicate that the input of English loan words in Persian was in three cases (the pronunciation of /r/, /oU/, and /A/) affected by the American accent and in one case (the pronunciation of /j/) by the British accent. Likewise, the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian is closer to the American accent in those three cases, while it is similar to the British accent in that single case.
Extended Abstract
1.Introduction
Loan phonology is one of the areas in phonology which addresses the nativization of words adapted by the borrowing language. Persian has borrowed numerous words from English. A question that has always been raised is whether the British accent known as the Received Pronunciation or the American accent known as the General American has affected the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian. In order to answer this question, the present study applied the Phonological Stance model within the framework of Optimality Theory (henceforth OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004) for the first time. This paper, therefore, sought to answer the following questions:

Which accent constitutes the input of English loan words in Persian, the British or the American accent?
To which English accent is the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian closer?
2.Theoretical framework
This research aimed at explaining the effects that the British and the American accents have had on the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian within the framework of OT and based on the Phonological Stance model.
     OT is one of the most significant developments in the generative grammar. The first detailed exposition of the theory appears in Prince and Smolensky's (1993) book, entitled ‘Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar’. Its goal is to explain the phonology of languages only by using a set of universal constraints. No phonological rule is being applied in its analyses because they generally explained the language-specific phenomena. In contrast, constraints in OT are not merely solutions to language-specific problems; they are claims about Universal Grammar (UG) seeking to explain phonological phenomena universally. Furthermore, there is no interaction between rules and constraints, i.e., OT is not a mixed theory. The principles of SPE phonology (Chomsky & Halle, 1968) namely rules and serial derivations between underlying representation (UR) and phonetic representation (PR) have been abandoned by OT; however, UR and PR which are renamed as input and output respectively, are being assumed in the classical sense.
     Moreover, in all the loan words in this research the input is in line with the Phonological Stance model (see Calabrese and Wetzels, 2009), according to which the input to loanword adaptations in Persian is their input in English. That is, the nativization is brought about by the Persian phonological processes that apply on input in English.
3.Methodology
In order to conduct this research, first of all, the most important differences between the British accent and the American accent i.e., the pronunciation of phonemes /r/, /oU/, /A/, and /j/ were considered according to the online dictionaries including Cambridge, Oxford, Longman, and Dictionary.com.  Then, the English loan words in Persian which included these phonemes in their inputs were specified according to the corpus provided in Sarrami (2022). Finally, these pronunciation differences were scrutinized in the British and American accents and Persian loan words within OT and based on the Phonological Stance model. Accordingly, after specifying the UR of the loan words, the phonological processes that they had undergone and the constraints (rankings) that had caused these processes were identified and analyzed in OT tableaux.
4.Results & Discussion
The findings of the present paper are as follow:
     Regarding the first research question, in three cases i.e., the pronunciations of /r/, /oU/, and /A/ the American accent constitutes the input of English loan words in Persian and in one case (the pronunciation of /j/) the British accent constitutes the input of English words adapted by Persian.
     As to the second research question, the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian is in three cases i.e., the pronunciation of /r/, /oU/, and /A/ is closer to the American accent because /r/ deletion does not occur in Persian just like the American accent. And because Persian has the vowels /oU/ and /A/ rather than the British vowels /@U/ and /Q/. With regard to the pronunciation of /j/ preceded by alveolars, the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian is like the British accent as yod (/j/) deletion is not a phonological process in Persian as well as the British accent.
5. Conclusions & Suggestions
Languages borrow words from other languages to fill the gaps in their own lexical inventory. The reasons for such lexical gaps vary greatly: cultural innovation that may introduce objects or actions that do not have a name in the borrowing language, and native words that may be perceived as non-prestigious. The pronunciation of loan words usually changes according to the phonological system of the borrowing language including the segmental and suprasegmental features as well as the phonotactics and phonological constraints. Since English has two standard accents, a research had to be done to study which accent affected the pronunciation of English loan words in Persian. To this end, this paper discussed this issue for the first time.
Further research could investigate the effects of original pronunciation of loan words borrowed from other languages on their pronunciation in Persian.
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