What this means for learners
AKAWAIO and TETUN share 14 sounds — roughly 61% of TETUN's inventory overlaps with AKAWAIO. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 5 sounds found only in TETUN represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for AKAWAIO speakers. The adult brain tends to map unfamiliar sounds onto the closest native equivalent — a process that produces the characteristic "accent" of a second-language speaker. Learning to hear and produce these sounds as distinct requires focused ear training, not just repetition.
Conversely, AKAWAIO has 9 sounds not used in TETUN. Native TETUN speakers learning AKAWAIO will face the mirror-image challenge with these sounds.
Phoneme inventories from PHOIBLE. Data reflects one documented inventory per language; some variation exists across dialects and sources.