A comparative study of vowels’ F1 and F2 values in frequent English loanwords in Polish and Russian languages

The paper presents results of an investigation of F1 and F2 formants values in English loanwords uttered by Polish and Russian native speakers during spontaneous speech. Ten participants with an equal level of English language proficiency took part in the experiment. Their stimulated conversation was recorded and English loanwords were extracted from the recordings to investigate the vowels’ formants, by means of the Praat software. The F1 and F2 analysis points out that a relationship between the frequency of loanwords’ occurrence and the similarity to pronunciation of language of origin exists. Corpus data were used to find the comparable frequencies of English loanwords’ occurrence in Polish and Russian