L1 Dialect Influence on L2 English Pronunciation: The Cases of Maribor and LjubljanaŠkofljanec, Matija (Avtor) Stopar, Andrej (Mentor) dialectformantmagnet effectcontrastive analysisnormalisationThis thesis investigates the manifestation of dialect influence on the pronunciation of Slovene learners of English. Previous research has shown that the phonology of a speaker’s first language influences their speech when learning a second language. Since Standard Slovene is a learned variety for most Slovenians, it was hypothesized that dialect influence would be present in the speech of students from Ljubljana and Maribor, two major cities belonging to distinct dialect groups. A contrastive analysis of phonemes was conducted, followed by an experiment in which recordings of 57 grammar school students were analysed to determine whether systematic and statistically significant differences between the two groups existed. The results show that there are statistically significant differences between the two groups for all General British vowels except /iː/, demonstrating that systematic differences do exist. Furthermore, a contrastive analysis of the differences between General British and Standard Slovene proved to be a good predictor of difficulties, but only in where the corresponding Standard Slovene vowel does not change in the dialect. Finally, most of the differences between the two groups can be readily explained through contrastive analysis when including dialect influence, strongly suggesting that dialect influence is a major factor in the participants’ pronunciation of English.20232023-10-05 07:16:47Magistrsko delo/naloga151342VisID: 534395COBISS_ID: 167131139sl