Difficulties of Pronunciation of Slovenian Speakers in Learning Italian Language

Abstract

Phonetics plays an important role in the field of language teaching since it not only facilitates the development of an accurate and conscious pronunciation but is also helpful to the teacher as it prevents the pronunciation difficulties students might encounter. The aim of this article is to find an answer to the question why Slovenian speakers learning Italian experience particular phonetic and phonological difficulties. The theoretical part presents the orthoepic situation of Slovenian and Italian, a brief phonetic and phonological analysis of the two languages with the description of speech sounds and their production, the position and function of accent, as well as some phonetic and phonological phenomena of Italian and Slovenian languages. The practical part consists of an analysis of audio recordings of three Slovenian speakers with the aim of identifying possible major 
difficulties.

Key words: phonetics, phonology, pronunciation, Italian, Slovenian