INTERFERENCE OF MALAYALAM ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING

The features of the first language find similarities and differences with the feature of second language,similarities facilitate and differences interfere second language learning.Malayalam ,as a first language ,exhibits these features of facilitation and interference when a Malayalee learns English after acquiring Malayalam.

Malayalam has major differences with English ,both languages belong to different families English belongs to In do-European where as Malayalam to Dravidian language. Unphonetic nature of English is heavily interfered by the phonetic nature of Malayalam.

Eg:-/o/ -on , one, won ,wolf

/k/ - kit , cat , school ,packet

The presence of silent letters in words is another reason ,malayalee have a tendency in the beginning to pronounce each and every letter they see in English words.

Eg:- r - girl

k -know

h - honest.

Malayalam is a syllable timed language where as English a stressed timed language.Malayalee have a tendency   to t English wrongly as syllable timed language which is due to the influence of malayalam.

"t" is a alveolar plosive ,malayalees wrongly pronounce it as retroflex sound which not in English use .

Malayalees pronounce "s/es" as /s/ /z/ and /iz/

Eg:- looks - /luks/ ,pigs - /pigz/ ,cases -/ keisiz/.

Past tense marker d /ed is pronounced as /t/ /d/ and /id/

Eg :- looked - /lukt/ ,filled - /fild/ , lighted -/laitid/

they do so in English because it is their familiar way in malayalam in which they are correct.

These are some of the problems in using English for malayalee but theoretical knowledge of relevant areas and sufficient practice can help the learners a lot in overcoming these kinds of interference.The beauty of a language is in its beauty of communication because language is primarily speech.