What this means for learners
CUBEO and Lak share 6 sounds — roughly 9% of Lak's inventory overlaps with CUBEO. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 63 sounds found only in Lak represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for CUBEO 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, CUBEO has 17 sounds not used in Lak. Native Lak speakers learning CUBEO 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.