I’ve bumped into and worked with enough Indian people to hear this accent (and of course heard it on TV and movies). What actual language is it a carryover from?
From looking at the Wikipedia article on Indian English I’d go with Hindi as the main influence of the stereotypical accent.
Some features of the ‘Indian accent’, like substituting retroflex for alveolar consonants, are common to a lot of Indian languages. Retroflex consonants are (I believe) found in a lot of Indian language, and the linguists think they were originally a feature of Dravidian languages that got borrowed into Indoe-European ones.
Some people tell me that they can distinguish different accents of Indian English (for example, they can differentiate a Punjabi speaking English from a Tamil).
Oh, I guess it’s actually more complex than a simple alveolar-retroflex substitution.
“The alveolar stops English /d/, /t/ are often retroflex [ɖ], [ʈ], especially in the South of India.[16] In Indian languages there are two entirely distinct sets of coronal plosives: one dental and the other retroflex. Native speakers of Indian languages prefer to pronounce the English alveolar plosives sound as more retroflex than dental,[17] and the use of retroflex consonants is a common feature of Indian English.[18][19] In the Devanagari script of Hindi, all alveolar plosives of English are transcribed as their retroflex counterparts. One good reason for this is that unlike most other native Indian languages, Hindi does not have true retroflex plosives (Tiwari, [1955] 2001). The so-called retroflexes in Hindi are actually articulated as apical post-alveolar plosives, sometimes even with a tendency to come down to the alveolar region. So a Hindi speaker normally cannot distinguish the difference between their own apical post-alveolar plosives and English’s alveolar plosives. However, languages such as Tamil have true retroflex plosives, wherein the articulation is done with the tongue curved upwards and backwards at the roof of the mouth. This also causes (in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) the /s/ preceding alveolar /t/ to allophonically change to [ʃ] (<stop> /stɒp/ → /ʃʈap/). Mostly in south India, some speakers allophonically further change the voiced retroflex plosives to voiced retroflex flap, and the nasal /n/ to a nasalised retroflex flap.”
Well, that cleared everything up nicely.
I’ll have to look at that when I get a chance. I’m in the part of the country with the largest percentage of Indian immigrants. I know many and deal with many more on a daily basis. And I can’t tell the difference between accents. But then again I often can’t tell English accents apart either. I guess my ear isn’t that good.
Basically, it’s saying that the difference in sounds is due in major part to how the tongue is shaped. Retroflex means the tongue is flat or concave. Plosive and stop mean the same thing and it’s a description of the airstream behavior in the sound (the air is stopped for a moment and then released in a blast) There’s a ridge behind the top row of teeth in your mouth known as the alveolar ridge and it sits in front of your hard palate. Apical means using the tip of the tongue to articulate the sound. It’s a whole lot of jargon to say, the sounds are due to changing around where the tongue is and how it’s affecting the airflow.
To me, as a non-linguist, the Indian accent is detectable not in the pronunciations of the consonantal phonemes, but in the vowels and diphthongs, the rhythm and lilt of the language, and the syllabic stress within English words, which are at variance with the way a native English speaker would place the accent. Given that that is the most conspicuous mark of an “Indian” speaker, I would assume that within India, a person’s mother tongue would be detectable by the rhythm of the language and the coloration of the vowels, not so much by the value of the consonants. Most speakers cannot “hear” consonants that do not occur in their own language, and perceive them as a similar consonant to one of their own, or not at all.
As a native English speaker, I detect the origin of English speakers (Canadian, for example) by the intonation and rhythm, not by the consonants. The Irish are easily recognizable just by the intonation and the rhythm. Very often, just the last syllable in a sentence is a dead giveaway, where I can generally spot a Canadian…
Thanks, Inner Stickler.
Actually, San Jose has the largest percentage of Indian immigrants (Trenton is second). The NY metro area has the most in absolute terms.
You are one of the reasons I sometimes wish the SDMB had a like facility.
In New Jersey over 3% of the total population is Indian. No other state comes close although there are pockets of population in certain states. You are correct if you are looking at only large cities.
I live in Central New Jersey. Around here the percentage of population is from about 12% up to 37%. None of the towns hit the 250,000 to put them on the big city list but many are a pretty decent size.
New Jersey
Carteret - 13.6%
Cranbury CDP - 11.5%
Cranbury Township - 10.5%
Edison - 28.3%
Fords - 11.1%
Iselin - 37.4%
North Brunswick -18.3%
Piscataway - 18.3%
Plainsboro - 29.5%
Robbinsville CDP - 15.7%
Secaucus - 11.1%
South Brunswick - 27.1%
West Windsor - 19.2%
Woodbridge - 15.3%
For instance Edison Twp has a population a little over 100,000 and 28% in Indian.
Dental = tongue pressed up against the teeth
Alveolar = tongue at the ridge behind the teeth
Retroflex = tongue rolled back against the top of the mouth.
I’m not a linguist, but that’s the best of my understanding, anyone is free to correct me.
Fair enough.
I’ve never actually heard Hindi spoken…is the somewhat singsong lilt of Indian English from the rhythms of Hindi, or from somewhere else?
What do you mean, eh?
J.
IMHO, spoken Hindi generally doesn’t sound sing-song at all. For many (if not most) Indians it is a second or third language, so I doubt it is the underlying source of the “Indian accent” anyway. In Maharashtra, people primarily speak Marathi (except in Mumbai, where nearly everyone speaks Hindi), in Gujarat, Gujarati, and so on. Indian schools have mostly been teaching English for longer than Hindi (and in some states all instruction is done in English.)
My stepfather is from Multan and speaks Punjabi, English, and Urdu, and no Hindi at all. He can only understand Hindi speakers because some of the vocabulary and construction of Urdu is the same.
That “eh” is very rarely used by Canadians, except in a few localities where it occasionally occurs…
I don’t thing Indian English has a singsong lilt. at least, not more so than Irish or Caribbean English.
Besides the dental/alveolar/retroflex differences, another indicative feature of Indian accents (to me) is they sometimes have different usages of aspirate vs. non-aspirated consonants. In American English, we aspirate sounds like ‘p’ at the start of words but not in the middle, and we don’t aspirate consonants like ‘b’ at all. Indian languages have different rules.
My mother used to complain about how Americans mispronounced Indian names with retroflex or aspirated consonants, she seemed to think the Americans were just being ornery or lazy about pronunciation. I had to explain to her, no, most Americans literally can’t hear the difference, unless they’ve trained themselves to listen specifically for them.