What this means for learners
ITELMEN and Kabardian share 13 sounds — roughly 21% of Kabardian's inventory overlaps with ITELMEN. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 50 sounds found only in Kabardian represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for ITELMEN 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, ITELMEN has 19 sounds not used in Kabardian. Native Kabardian speakers learning ITELMEN 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.