Abstract: A system and method for creating an embedded phoneme map from a corpus of speech in accordance with a multiplicity of acoustic features of the speech. The embedded phoneme map is used to determine how to pronounce borrowed words from a lending language in the borrowing language, using the phonemes of the borrowing language that are closest to the phonemes of the lending language. The embedded phoneme map is also used to help linguists visualize the phonemes being pronounced by a speaker in real-time and to help non-native speakers practice pronunciation by displaying the differences between proper pronunciation and actual pronunciation for open-ended speech by the speaker.