Advice on dealing with coworkers with heavy indian accents!

Most of the consultants in our company are from India, and I’ve had two professors also from India, one with a pretty thick accent. I became quite good at understanding the accent.

One of the things I’ve noticed most consistently is that the people I’ve known who speak with an Indian accent usually put the accent on a different syllable. So instead of “IM pro vise”, it would be “im PRO vise”. Once you start to catch on to the accenting of words, it becomes easier to follow a sentence. I’m usually a step behind, whenever I hear someone with a thick accent, as I’m “translating” their sentences in my head.

The call centre I work in takes calls from all over the U.S. I get to deal with American accents (which I’m not overly familiar with, being Canadian), plus the accents of just about every other nation and region in the world. The people behind the accents are usually not happy when they call, and that doesn’t help. I’ve got to diagnose the problem and find a solution, which sometimes involves pushing a lot of buttons. It’d be easy if I was there to push them and read the screen, but I’m not.

It’s basic troubleshooting, really. I take the parts of the sentence that I understood, rephrase them, listen to the response and pull a couple more words, ask a question, listen to the answer, and sooner or later it works out. When you hear the same accent or group of accents every day, you pick up on it pretty quickly.

My only fear is that the callers will think I’m mocking them because my own speech tends to fall into the patterns of the people I’m listening to. My French and German profs were always quite impressed with my accent. I never had the heart to tell them that I’d gotten them from Pepe Lepew and Sgt. Schultz. I can do a very good imitation of Brad Pitt’s Mickey from “Snatch”. It’s sometimes fun to use, but the people hearing it don’t know the agony I went through for the two days after the movie when I COULDN’T STOP DOING IT!

It’s like anything else, McLeo, it gets easier as you go along.

Indian languages are syllable-timed. Native English is stress-timed. These terms refer to how the units of speech are divided up according to the flow of time, comparable to the way musical notes are scored according to measures and time signatures. These are two very different ways of allocating speech sound to time measurements.

Indian English is spoken syllable-timed, which is the main reason it’s difficult to understand for anyone not used to hearing this.

You are used to English spoken stress-timed, which like the poetry of Matthew Arnold can have any number of syllables in a given length of time, but only a certain number of stressed syllables. In spoken English, the unstressed syllables are de-emphasized and often slurred over. Our ears are used to catching the stressed syllables and constructing meaning out of those.

Indian English is so impenetrable to you because they don’t really have stressed syllables the way we do. The audible signposts to mark out the flow of speech that you’re trying to listen for just aren’t there. Instead, Indian English patterns the syllables in a constant flow. If any stress is incidentally given to a syllable (often not the one you expect to hear it on, as DeadlyAccurate observed), it is not significant for the Indian English speaker. That throws off the native English-speaking listener.

My suggestion is to consciously focus in on each syllable and train yourself to hear the actual speech sounds being pronounced, and to forget for the moment about trying to catch the stresses. This is more akin to getting meaning from reading text, in which each letter is equal and stresses are not transcribed in the writing (at least, they’re not usually transcribed in writing!).

A French professor told me once that casual French speech emphasises (like English) the pattern of stressed syllables, to the point where the talking-drum-like intonation conveys the meaning of familiar phrases, even when the phonemes themselves are slurred. He gave as the example somebody who gets onto a Parisian bus or taxicab and mumbles the name of a familiar place; the driver will know what the passenger is asking for just by the pattern of intonation, not by making out individual phonemes. The professor told us we will never sound like native French speakers unless we develop this intonation pattern.

So these Indian English speakers have no idea of the intonation pattern, even though that’s what you’re listening for. Instead, if you ignore intonation and stress, and listen for the individual phonemes and let your brain assemble them into words, that will convey the meaning to you.

This is so sad - I love the sounds of the sub-continent.

Indian men are so charming. And the culture places a great value on joking and silliness. It’s all good!

A great many of my (very white, very American) parents’ friends are Indian. My mother is a registered nurse, and there’s a high concentration of Indian doctors in the area for some reason. I’d just like to echo everyone else who said that as you hear more Indian accents, it will be easier to catch on. Since I’ve been hearing the Indian doctors my whole life, the Indian university professors are no big deal now.