Watching some tech tutorial videos lately, a lot of which are narrated by people with varying thicknesses of Indian accent. They speak quickly and with little or no pause between words or sentences, making it very hard to follow along.
I assume their native language has a different way of marking the end of words and sentences, otherwise they’d be just as unintelligible in their native language. So, how does Hindi and/or Tamul (not sure which region they come from) mark the end of a word or thought to separate it from the next?
Nearly all variants of English are typically spoken more rapidly than is usual in American English - American speakers are noted for their relatively measured pace of speech (though there are, of course, marked regional variations even within America). And there’s probably no language in the world in which native speakers leave audible pauses between words, whatever about sentences - not even native speakers of American English.
So this speech is faster than you are accustomed to, plus it’s delivered with an accept that is quite unfamiliar to you. Nearly all foreign languages sound lile an unbroken gabble, including English, to non-speakers of English, and the same to some extant happens even with signficantly different accents/variants of the language we aspeak ourselves. But to people who use this variant of English, it’s readily comprehensible; it doesn’t need special markers for the end of sentences any more than American English does.
That’s how your own accent of English sounds like to a non-native speaker, unless you’re a Brit from one of those dialects which stop in the middle of words. And how my Spanish sounds to a non-native, a native French speaker’s to a non-native…
You’re having problems following along due to the accents, but the “everything gets pulled together” is a function of not understanding it; it’s not a peculiarity of those speakers’ accents.
Speaking slowly enough to separate between words and sentences is either done for oratorial effect, as for speechmaking, or as a courtesy to non-native listeners, as at an academic conference.
What you’re hearing is not someone porting Hindi patterns into bad English. It’s that they’re speaking English at a native or near-native fluency in an accent you’re not accustomed to, because English is a language of school instruction from an early age there. And yes, there is a range of Indian English accents, from something close or equivalent to British RP to something which indeed sounds like Hindi-read English.
I got used to even relatively “heavy” Indian accents after years of working with colleagues from there, and some years ago was somewhat embarrassed to find I had more trouble understanding a newer set of colleagues in Edinburgh, Scotland than the guys on from Gurgaon, India while on a midnight emergency conference call.
I’ve since digested the Scottish accent; at least the kind I hear from office-speaking professionals, maybe not the Glasgow dockworker variety. But as long as the vocabulary is shared, it’s all about familiarity with the accent.
Just to clarify, I hope you understand that most Indian languages and European languages (including English) have the same roots. cite : List of Indo-European languages - Wikipedia
You cannot infer that all IE languages have similar sentence structures. Latin is essentially free word order. English and French use Subject Verb Object word order; German varies between SVO in simple main clauses to SOV most everywhere else; and Celtic languages are VSO.
The perception that there are “pauses” between words in any dialect of spoken English is an illusion. All languages run the words together. When you understand the language you can distinguish the individual words, and when you don’t understand it, it sounds like an smooth flow of gibberish.
I’m seeing estimates that the average English speaker speaks about 110-120 words per minute, but English can be easily understood at up to 200 words per minute or more. There’s simply no time for pauses between words.
In one of his books, Steven Pinker pointed out that when listening to rapid speech, you’re hearing something like 15-20 phonemes per second. If each phoneme were replaced with a click, you would NOT hear a rapid sequence of clicks; you would hear a low hum. Our auditory system is not capable of hearing individual clicks at 15-20 Hz, yet we can not only hear individual phonemes at that rate, we can recognize each one as a particular one from a set of 40ish. Imagine being able to reliably recognize 40 different types of clicks in a stream of 20 clicks per second, for hours at a time! Yet we do it when we listen to speech. So it makes sense that word boundaries would be recognizable without adding needing pauses to be added to the stream. When pauses do occur, of course, they usually occur on word boundaries.
(nitpick) The natural word order in Latin is SOV. You certainly have more freedom and flexibility than in English, but the order of words is not “free”, and is in many situations absolutely fixed.
American English DOES has a separator at the end of sentences. There’s a half-beat pause between the end of one and the start of the next. You can tell the differences between words because of the emphasis placed on certain syllables.
I was hoping there’d be some pattern or system they’re porting over from another language that I could use to sort things out. But it sounds like everybody’s saying that accent is always going to be a difficult to understand because it’s just too different from what I’m used to.
My suspicion is that, outside of people giving speeches, or reading aloud from a text, that “half-beat pause” isn’t necessarily consistently there in how Americans speak, and where pauses do get sprinkled in, it isn’t necessarily at the end of sentences.
There is also shift in the intonation pattern at sentence breaks. Native English speakers, at least in the United States, will tend to have a rising tone of voice in the first half of a declarative sentence, and then a descending tone toward the end. That’s one of the reasons it sounds strange
For example, once in Heathrow, after a very long flight, I spoke to an airport employee who was speaking standard British English, and I simply could not parse what he was saying until he slowed way down. Yet, no matter how tired I am, I never have that problem with English spoken with my native US (North Midland) accent.
Hindi and Urdu, in fact all Indo-Aryan languages except Kashmiri, and all Dravidian languages too, are SOV. But that doesn’t carry over into Hinglish, which is SVO like any other form of English.
The main challenge to listening to Indian English is the way the flow of speech is timed: Hindi is syllable-timed, but English is stress-timed, which makes a difference in how a hearer’s brain processes the sounds. Hindi and Indian English give the same lengths of time to each syllable, shorter times for open syllables and longer times for syllables ending in consonants. It’s as regular as a beat of eighth notes and quarter notes in music, practically metronomic.
But English stretches or squeezes the lengths of syllables depending on where the stress is placed. That’s why Gerard Manley Hopkins figured he could squeeze a bunch of extra syllables into a line in what he called “sprung rhythm,” which he discovered is endemic to English speech. The natural flow of English speech uses these uneven length syllables with the stressed ones taking longer and the unstressed ones crammed into a shorter time. In musical terminology, Hindi is tempo giusto while English is rubato.
Along with the syllable timing, in some varieties of Indian English, there are no reduced vowels. All vowels are given their full value. That can affect how a speaker of standard American or British English hears it, because they are expecting to hear stressed syllables with full vowels surrounded by unstressed syllables with reduced vowels.
My personal metric for a good beginning in a language is that I can “hear the words”. Not necessarily knowing what they mean, but my brain parsing them apart.
Unfortunately, this is seldom taught in English-as-a-second-language courses. Or perhaps it’s not emphasized enough to the students. I think because a lot of speakers of common European languages (Spanish, French, German, etc) are already used to placing stress patterns on words and sentences and simply adapt to English’s. But speakers of languages without stress patterns pick it up slowly and don’t realize how necessary it is to native comprehension. And many natives don’t realize it either, because it’s baked into our brains. The sound values can be fine but if the stress is wrong, it’s nearly incomprehensible. But the values can be poor if the stress pattern is good.
I compare it to learning a tonal language (like Chinese languages) in terms of difficulty for someone coming from a language without it.
I find that in a completely unfamiliar language, that takes awhile, at least for me, before I can reach that stage. When I moved to Hungary, I had pretty much zero reference point for Hungarian, and I couldn’t tell where a word stopped or ended until at least several weeks into my stay there (luckily, Hungarian has a predictable stress pattern–the first syllable is stressed in a word, but there can be secondary stresses in longer words.) It’s tough, because I can’t think of any language that doesn’t run all the words together soitsoundsmorelikethis that. sounding. like. this.
Meanwhile, in a language like German or Russian it’s easy for me as I can parse out the German words via English and Russian via Polish. I may not know the words, but I can figure it out from the rhythm and from the languages I already know. A completely foreign language, though, forget it. That’s going to take some time.
At this point, Indian English is a “native” syllable-timed variety of English. If you are in a field in which speakers of this variety are common, you’re better off just getting yourself accustomed to it rather than complaining that they aren’t being taught English properly.