Researcher and linguists have pointed some linguists factors such as the different sound system

between the L1 and L2, inconsistency of some sounds in English language, the mother tongue
interference and the influence of spelling on pronunciation. These factors are known as linguistic
factors, which we will discussed separately in detail as follows:
Mother tongue interference
In the near past (brown, 2000) found that a second language learner meets difficulty, because his L1
affects his L2 especially in adulthood, and this affect is a result of L1 transfer; so it is a significant source
of making errors for second language learners. (Ladefoged, 2001;Carter and Nunan, 2001) so that
mother tongue has clear influence on learning L2 pronunciation. Where L1 and L2 rules are in conflict,
errors are expected to be committed by foreign learner’s.
The mispronunciation of the above sound is the result of the over practice of the first language, a
process of fossilization. The adult vocal musculature is set to pronounce foreign sounds with accent
(Yule;O’Conor) said that the main problem of English pronunciation is to build a new set of sound
corresponding to the sound of English, and to break down the arrangement of sound which the habits
and the system of our L1 has built strongly built up. And that means the we use anew way of hearing
and a new way of using our organ of speech. It is so difficult to changed such habits which a learner used
since his childhood or at least it has a very long years to changed with a regular practice. So the point
mentioned that the learner confuse such sound and replace each one of them with other sound that are
said to be the nearest ones to them (O Conor, 2003)
Different sound system between L1 and L2
According to (Alkhuli, 1983) who showed that the main problem of learning and teaching English
pronunciation result from the differences in the sound of system of English and native language this
means that the organ of speech of the learners are not trained to produce such sound system because
they are unfamiliar to him; that’s why he uses the nearest sound such as /s/ and /z/. (Cruttenden
rittenden, 1994) noted that in the field of (SLA), that learners with different linguistic backgrounds
would of course face different difficulties in order to produce english sound, because of the differences
between the two languages. These differences between the sound system are barrier against
competence in pronunciation to English, because the new sound remains strange for their organ of
speech specially if they start learning English in the age of adulthood.
In English language there are twenty four consonants and twenty vowels; that mean there are forty-four
phonemes in English language the learner should able to produce them while learning english. Learners
with the different language background will of course face some difficulties to pronounce them because
of their language background (O’Conor, 2003).
Inconsistency of some sound in English language
One of the important problems that faced by the student of English in general is that English vowel
sound has more than one pronunciation, this causes many difficulties to the learners and leads them to
a mispronunciation (Cruttenden, 1994) noted that main difficulty for all those whose own languages
have a less complex of vowels system, lies in the established qualitative opposition.

According to (O’Conor, 2003) that is not simple to know the exact sound letter stand for or represent in
a certain word for instance in the word city /siti/, busy /bizi/, pretty /pritti/, women /wimin/, In english
the letter y, u, o, a, e all of them stand for the same sound /i/. The learner who doesn’t have sufficient
knowledge of different pronunciation of vowels above, meets some difficulties, since he uses different
variant of their pronunciation. Linguists and researchers connect some problem with the complexity of
the vowel sound system that exit in a English and inconsistency of its pronunciation. (Cruttenden, 1994)
noted that the inconsistency of English vowels causes difficulties for other language learner in English.
English learners who don’t have the mastery of pronunciation of such words will also face some
difficulties.
Influence of the spelling on pronunciation
Yule, 2001 noted that the sound of spoken English do not match up, a lot of time, with letter written
English if we cannot use of the letters of the alphabet in consistent way to represent the sound we
make, it is difficult describe the sounds of a language like English. The learner who still doesn’t have the
mastery of pronunciation of such word, pronounces each one of them by looking of its spelling, and he is
expected to mispronounced them(O’Conor).Carter Nunan (2001) reported; is something teachers should
be aware of; since correspondence between orthography and phonology enables the students to predict
the spelling he mispronounced words by just looking at their spelling, also (Easton, 2005) showed that
there are some words with silent and which causes problems for the learner for instance. Any time the
student meets such word he will be confused to pronounce them correctly he will just guesses by
looking at the spelling of the word unless he had a previous background. So it is important to consult
from time to time to check the pronunciation of such word until he possess a good mastery of their
pronunciations.