Is there a linguistic term for, for example, certain Russian words sounding strange to the ears of a native English speaker?
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Sign up to join this communityIn linguistics, this phenomenon is called cross-language speech perception.
A large amount of research has studied how users of a language perceive foreign speech (referred to as cross-language speech perception) or second-language speech (second-language speech perception). The latter falls within the domain of second language acquisition.
Languages differ in their phonemic inventories. Naturally, this creates difficulties when a foreign language is encountered. For example, if two foreign-language sounds are assimilated to a single mother-tongue category the difference between them will be very difficult to discern.