Aspiration

Pakistani speakers do not aspirate stops in word initial position when they occur before a vowel. Thus, the word kit was realized as , without an aspiration on [k] unlike RP [k^hɪt]. This non-realization of an allophonic distribution of voiceless stops in PakE can be explained by looking at Urdu. Urdu, like many other South Asian languages, has a four-way phonemic contrast between voiced and voiceless stops, and aspirated and unaspirated stops. This phonemic contrast is represented in the orthography of the language. There is therefore a good cause for L1 influence in English, with speakers treating stops in all positions as unaspirated.