Orthographic effects in the pronunciation of English borrowings in Polish: evidence from attested pronunciations and Text-to-Speech systems

Abstract

This paper investigates the pronunciation of English borrowings in Polish, focussing on how orthography influences their phonological adaptation. Two complementary studies are presented. Study 1 examines the attested pronunciations of over 200 English borrowings in Polish extracted from Polish-language YouTube videos. Study 2 analyzes the output of two commercial Text-to-Speech systems (Google and Microsoft) when rendering 184 company names with English material embedded in Polish carrier sentences. The patterns revealed are as follows: (1) Some English vowels and consonants are consistently adapted via Polish grapheme-to-phoneme rules, especially KIT /ɪ/ and commA /ə/; (2) other vowels, such as TRAP and GOAT, show variability, alternating between phonological and graphemic routes; (3) most consonants, and some vowels, are rendered phonologically as Polish phonological equivalents on the basis of English grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences; (4) those English phonemes whose English grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences deviate most noticeably from Polish grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are more likely to be adapted phonologically; (5) those whose donor correspondences are similar to recipient correspondences are more likely to follow the graphemic route. Notably, the Text-to-Speech output generally aligns very well with attested spoken data, suggesting that these systems reflect evolving community norms. The findings may indicate the emergence of endonormative patterns for English in Polish contexts.