Intelligibility of Philippine English to a Selected ASEAN Country – Thailand

This paper is a sequence to a bigger research project that attempts to document the intelligibility of Philippine English (PE) to its neighboring countries, specifically those included in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) partnership. From this perspective, the study attempted to identify and demonstrate how intelligible PE is to Thais. The study examined acrolectal, mesolectal, and basilectal speakers of PE, and they underwent two tests, the pronunciation task, and the stress task. The listeners were given six tests, three cloze tests, one intelligibility questionnaire, one perception of PE, and one English proficiency self-assessment. These tests were to confirm that they really belong to the lectal category. The results revealed that PE is about 50% intelligible for Thais. The factors that have strongly affected this intelligibility rate are listeners’ familiarity with the variety and the speakers’ effort, choice of words, rate, and pronunciation. It has to be noted that English in Thailand is a foreign language, but then the listeners’ perceived language proficiency did not significantly affect the intelligibility of PE. Moreover, their perception of PE did not affect their understanding of the utterances of the speakers.