What this means for learners
BAI and Kharia share 14 sounds — roughly 30% of Kharia's inventory overlaps with BAI. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 33 sounds found only in Kharia represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for BAI 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, BAI has 15 sounds not used in Kharia. Native Kharia speakers learning BAI 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.