According to the venerable Trivial Pursuit ™, Mahatma Gandhi spoke English in an Irish accent. Is this true? And if so, how come?
I assume if it is true it had something to do with being taught by Irish teachers?
thanks,
Mogiaw
Well, there aren’t exactly a lot of Irishmen wandering around India, teaching or otherwise.
Gandhi’s formative years were spent at an open-air school with an Indian teacher, and he later studied in London.
I think TP has missed the boat on this one. Hell, Ben Kingsley doesn’t even have an Irish accent.
I’ve heard Gandhi speak English (recordings) and that is not any Irish accent I’ve ever heard. He spoke English with an Indian accent.
Yep. If you rent the movie Gandhi there is a special feature with news reel footage of him and some does have sound. There is something unique about his voice, but an Irish accent isn’t it.
OTOH I’ve heard this said before that educated Indian accents can be mistaken for Irish.
There’s one woman on NPR ‘Snigdha Prakash’ who’s accent straddles that line. I could listen to her all day long.
Uh, is Trivial Pursuit completely nuts?
First, it’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s heard him speak that he does not speak with an Irish accent. He speaks with an Indian (Subcontinent) accent, which is stereotyped as being singsongy but otherwise is utterly different from how the Irish sound.
Second, trying to define a dialect that broadly is a mug’s game. The people who actually work with dialects tend to make dialect maps that show the regional speech differences in areas as small as a single US state, much smaller than Ireland and a damned sight smaller than the Subcontinent. So saying that Ireland or India has a single accent is nonsense to anyone who would be in a positon to really judge what accent a person has. And if you’re like most people, and have never formally studied dialects in your life, accent is rather subjective: My hearing of a broad `a’ would, to you, simply be How People Talk and, hence, Not An Accent. That being said, there’s a broad consensus on how different nationalities speak English: Lucky from the Lucky Charms commercials has an Irish accent, Mohandas Gandhi had an Indian accent.
While the story about Gandhi speaking with an Irish accent may be untrue, not to say bizarre, there most certainly were a lot of Irish men and women teaching in what are now India and Pakistan, both Catholic and Presbyterian missionaries.
When I saw the film “The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain” I thought that the accents of some of the Welsh characters sounded like the stereotypical “singsong” Indian accent.
Oh, yes, Chance, I’m glad to meet another Snigdha Prakash fan. She usually talks about the mutual fund market or projected quarterly growth statistics, but I never notice what she’s actually saying. I just delight in the beautiful music of her voice. I can never decide if she sounds more Indian or more Scottish. She isn’t on the air nearly often enough.
Gandhi came from Gujarat, and if you’re used to hearing the accent of Hindi speakers, well, a Gujarat accent could be noticeably different. Within India, the Panjabi accent is known as the real singsongy one. Panjabi is the one Indian language that is tonal.