Comment by tndibona
2 hours ago
On another note - Indians often switch the w’s and v’s. I don’t know why. If you’re Indian - try pronouncing victory, whisky, and wonderful.
2 hours ago
On another note - Indians often switch the w’s and v’s. I don’t know why. If you’re Indian - try pronouncing victory, whisky, and wonderful.
Hindi uses the sound /ʋ/ which is a sound with elements of both v and w. This means that to many Indians, v and w are allophonic: they are heard as the same sound.
An example of allophony in English is the aspirated /pʰ/ in pin and the unaspirated /p/ in spin, which to a speaker of Hindi and many other languages would be considered two distinct sounds.
Czech is my mother tongue and I have regular issues with this too (have been mainly English speaking for the last 10 years). Czech does not have a /w/ sound and it confuses me the other way as well, like you said with "victory".