What this means for learners
DYIRBAL and Cebuano share 13 sounds — roughly 62% of Cebuano's inventory overlaps with DYIRBAL. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 8 sounds found only in Cebuano represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for DYIRBAL 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, DYIRBAL has 3 sounds not used in Cebuano. Native Cebuano speakers learning DYIRBAL 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.