Question: Pronunciation of ‘k’. I’ve noticed that Filipinos I hear, including the sound examples on this website, sometimes don’t pronounce the letter ‘k’ hard as in English, but soft, with a sound I don’t think is common in English, but corresponds to the Swedish ‘sj’ and ‘sk’ (kind of like an English ‘sh’, but further back in the mouth). For example, in the sound samples of this lesson, the ‘k’ is soft when they say “Okey naman” and the last ‘k’ in “kumusta ka”, but hard when they say ikaw:
www.tagalog.com/less ons/lesson.php?lesso n_id=31&csid=49
I couldn’t find this mentioned in the lesson about pronunciation. Maybe it’s only a regional dialect? It seems to happen more when preceded by open vowels (e.g. ‘a’, ‘o’) than by closed vowels, but I’m not sure.
Does anyone have more knowledge on this?