A Comparative Study between Native and Non-Native characters' Phonetic Variations in "The King Maker"

ABSTRACT

Phonetics covers the study of sound. In the production of sound, most speakers of the same language have different pronunciations. The way they realize that single phoneme is various. It leads the happening of distinctive phonetics between them. This fact is clearly shown by British and Thai, since they are native and non-native speakers of English language. Consequently, this research answers the problem of what phonetic variations possessed by the native and non-native speakers and the comparative phonetics across the two.

The native and non-native of this research are the characters in ‘The King
Maker’. It is an English Thai film that involves characters from different nations, they are British and Thai, where they have phonetic performance, the different manner and place of sound articulated is very salient.

The research design conducted in this research is a descriptive qualitative
and comparative method. The data source are got from the film in the form of sounds of all words produced by both groups, then only the sounds of similar words and syllable are chosen as the data. Besides, the process of analyzing the data has some steps; transcribing the sounds, sorting the phonetics, classifying the particular phonetic variations, and formulating the similarities and differences of phonetic variations of the two characters.

Overall, the conclusion of this research is formulated as follows. The variety of phonetics does not occur only inside each group but also within the group. It is caused by two reasons, the occupation of phoneme in a syllable and
the influence of the vernacular sounds. Therefore, the matters influence the quality
of sounds they make. For example, there are some sounds that cannot be produced by Thai, they are voiced labiodental fricative consonant / /, voiced alveolar fricative consonant / /, and voiced postalveolar fricative consonant / /. However, Thai can produce other sounds out of their vernacular. It is because their access to communicate with people from other regions is widely exposed. Thus, they can shape and utter some new sounds.

There are some future researches that are suggested by the researcher, they
are: examining the internal phonetic variations merely on native speakers or non- native speakers, investigating the suprasegmental features of the same object to this research, and doing this kind of research in quantitative method by involving linguistic variables.