Hindi and Urdu, at least in their spoken form, are so linguistically similar and so closely related (both are derived from the 19th-century north Indian khari boli dialect) that it’s debatable whether they even count as separate languages rather than (respectively) Sanskritized and Persianized “registers” of the same language.
I get it that Hindi and Urdu speakers prefer to stick to the general flavor of their own dialects when conversing rather than trying to imitate each other’s language, just as New Yorkers don’t change their language when conversing with, say, an Edinburgh native speaking Scots. But the relationship between New York English and Scots is much closer and stronger than just “some of the vocabulary and construction is the same”, and the same applies to the relationship between Hindi and Urdu.
And yes, I agree with the assessment that to the ears of British/US English speakers there’s nothing particularly “singsong” or “lilting” about the sound of spoken Hindi, although Indian English can strike us that way.
To expand, it’s not a real Indian accent, just an American voice actor’s impression of what Indians sound like. It’s choppy and inconsistent, uses consonants that no Indian would use, and mixes features of different Indian regions.
Come to think of it, why would we even assume that Indian English “sounds like” an actual Indian language in any meaningful way?
I don’t think that English spoken with a heavy accent by, say, a French person or a Chinese person sounds particularly like spoken French or Chinese. When I speak French or some other language as a native English speaker, the native French or whatever speakers I’m talking to don’t seem to think it sounds like spoken English.
The accent of a non-native speaker definitely changes the sound of a language, but AFAICT it doesn’t change it into the sound of the speaker’s own native tongue.
Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “sounds like.” It’s not at all difficult for me to pick out an American speaker trying to speak a foreign language with a heavy accent. You can still hear the American English there. As they become more proficient speakers, they begin losing some of the tell-tale giveaways, like the “r” sound, for instance, or diphthongizing or otherwise approximating sounds like ö and ü into more familiar American English equivalents. Similarly, having grown up in a Polish-American household, I certainly hear the Polish in the accent of my parents, for instance. Many of the vowels and consonants I hear them use are actually the closest Polish sounds. So in that sense, their English sounds like Polish, or, maybe more accurately it is to say their English contains the sounds of Polish. Sometimes, accent patterns of Polish will also slip into English. (In Polish, the accent is almost always on the penultimate syllable of a word.)
Well, if it helps any, my North Indian friends say I speak Hindi with a South Indian accent.
The Indian English wiki article mentioned earlier in the thread has a good rundown of all the issues.
I’m not a linguistic expert, but I think the English accent will largely depend on how early you learned English (if you learned it as a second language) and what your primary language is, since they all have slightly different issues.
For example, in some Indian languages, there isn’t really a distinction between p or b (and k or g), so if I hear someone sliding their p’s/b’s (or their k’s/g’s) together, I assume that their primary language is one of those languages. But since lots of Indian languages do make this distinction, there are going to be a lot of Indian accents that don’t do this.
To add to the complexity, there is also a snooty, Anglo-fied accent that is used a lot in newscasts and movies and the like. My friends and I call this a “convent school accent,” but I don’t know if there’s an official term for it. But even here, you get different versions of this accent, depending on the part of the country you’re in.
I have long been intrigued by how, to my non-specialist ears, South Indian (Dravidian family) speakers and North Indian (Indo-European family) speakers seem to have similar “accents” (interference pronunciation patterns*) when speaking English. I assumed it was due to some sort of sprachbund effect – languages throughout the subcontinent borrowing certain features from each other, despite vastly different familial origins of the languages.
Hector St. Clare did in fact clear this up for me in his/her post about true retroflex consonants having been semi-borrowed from Dravidians to I-E’s, but there must be more commonalities than just this, as another poster observed.
(*While popular usage uses “accent” for both things, I try to save this word only for regional pronunciation patterns WITHIN a language, and use “interference” for how an individual’s first language affects how they pronounce a language learned later in life.)
But I don’t really know if they have similar accents. I can’t do IPA, but for example, if I hear someone say “zimb(uh)ly” for “simply,” that, to me, would read as a Malayali accent, which I would not expect a North Indian to have.
On another note, I was thinking about the sing-song aspect, and I think that might be a function of where the default stress position is placed on a syllable in different Indian languages. English (I think) has pretty much no rhyme-or-reason for which syllable is stressed, but in most Indian languages (I think), there are fairly strict stress rules. And I don’t think (I could be wrong) any Indian languages have something like the Spanish accent mark, which allows you to change stress rules for particular words. So, it could be that native speakers just apply the default stress rules to English words which reads to an English speaker as sing-songy.
Just to reiterate the reply to Kimstu: Interference (“accent”) is very much about unconsciously imposing the inventory of sounds in one’s native language (and also stress patterns, etc.) on one’s later-learned language(s). If you think about it, where else could the differences come from?
(Actually, there can be an additional source, sort of: when English is taught as a second language in certain countries, the teachers can pass on some features unique to the English of that region or country (say, Malaysia). But this is more at the level of vocabulary; and when it’s about pronunciation, usually the differences are, once again, rooted in mismatched phonemic inventories between English and the primary language(s) of the country.)
Compared to me, this already makes you a “specialist”! My experience is mainly from good friends whose first language is Kannada, and my in-laws whose first language is Tamil – both languages are Dravidian. All speak English, to my ears, rather like any stereotypical Hindi speaker (even Apu). Not exactly the same, but more similarly than, say, a native Greek or Spanish speaker speaks English.
This is actually huge. The accent / interference of the particular ESL teacher strongly affects / infects the speech of the students.
I recall a conversation I had with a Russian whose English sounded more like a BBC broadcast than it sounded like a typical Russian speaking Russian-accented American-ish. IOW he had much more Brit than Russian in his speech.
Turns out he’d learned English from a Brit who’d worked as an ESL instructor at his University in Stalingrad / Leningrad.
Did you mean Scots or Scottish English? They’re not the same thing. Scots is often regarded as a distinct language and it’s often not mutually intelligible with English.
Right. For example, my understanding of why Spanish often replaces Latin “F” with “H” at the start of the word (e.g. “hierro”, “hinojo”, “hoja”) is because Iberian Latin was influenced by the accents of native Basque speakers, who didn’t have an F sound.
Tamil is one of those languages where I don’t think they particularly distinguish ‘k’ and ‘g’ or ‘p’ and ‘b’. They don’t really do much with aspiration, either, so ‘k’, ‘g’, ‘gh’, and ‘kh’ all end up being spelled the same. I have an aspirated consonant in my name (it’s a Sanskrit-origin one) so last time I was in Chennai, salespeople would sometimes misspell it when writing out receipts and stuff.
Re: Apu, I’m surprised they couldn’t find an Indian-origin voice actor to play him. I realize there were a lot fewer Indians in North America 25 years ago then there are today, but there surely were enough to find one.
You’re right. Since “g” is just the voiced form of “k” and “b” is just the voiced form of “p”, and Tamil doesn’t do the voiced/unvoiced distinction (so no clear difference between “d” and “t” or “j” and “ch” either), the voiced/unvoiced/aspirated/unaspirated versions of consonants all get thrown into the same category.
They sure do have a lot of distinct semivocalic consonants (e.g., forms of “r” and “l”) to make up for it, though.
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Re: Apu, I’m surprised they couldn’t find an Indian-origin voice actor to play him. I realize there were a lot fewer Indians in North America 25 years ago then there are today, but there surely were enough to find one.
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I’m sure there were a fair number of American voice actors of South Asian descent back then, but they probably grew up speaking standard American English. They might not have been much better at representing the speech patterns of Indian English than the average non-South-Asian American voice actor would be. I don’t think somebody with a natural “Indian accent” could have made a living as a voice actor in the US a quarter-century ago.
As far as I can tell from talking to native speakers, they have a ‘normal’ L, a retroflex L, a flapped R, a trilled R, and a letter (“retroflex approximant”) that sounds to me a little bit like an American R, but is usually transcribed with a ZH or an L. (It’s famously difficult for north Indians or Anglophones to pronounce, and in some Tamil dialects it’s pronounced like an L: it’s the last letter in ‘Tamil’.)
I can’t think of a (US-based) actor with a natural Indian accent even now. There’s Kal Penn, that guy from Heroes, and a bunch of British (Indian) people.
Hindi and Urdu, at least in their spoken form, are so linguistically similar and so closely related (both are derived from the 19th-century north Indian khari boli dialect) that it’s debatable whether they even count as separate languages rather than (respectively) Sanskritized and Persianized “registers” of the same language.
in his/her post about true retroflex consonants having been semi-borrowed from Dravidians to I-E’s, but there must be more commonalities than just this, as another poster observed.