Yeah, I really don’t understand Chief Pedant’s attempt here to link Indian education levels or socioeconomic class with a north-south divide, even approximately.
He may be confused by the fact that southern Indians tend to have darker skin than northern ones and that there’s a bias in some parts of Indian culture towards lighter skin as reflecting higher status. But as you note, conventional class markers in various Indian subcultures are hugely complex and ramified, and there are many characteristics that are much more important than complexion in determining traditional social status, chief among them being “caste” or more broadly varna (i.e., whether you’re a member of a Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaisya or Sudra group).
Ain’t no way that, say, a Tamil entrepreneur or professor from a Brahmin background would be perceived by Indians as having a “less educated” accent than a Punjabi with similar background, no matter how dark-skinned the former happened to be.
In my experience, you’ve got this exactly backwards (at least if you’re talking about Indians speaking English).
Indian consonants (at least in northern languages) include D’s and T’s that are more purely dental than those of “native-speaker English”*, so Indians speaking English as a rule will “dentalize” the D’s and T’s. (This is partly what gives many Indian English accents the distinctive “clipped” sound that native English speakers in earlier days disparagingly characterized as “mincing” or “chichi”.)
“As the polish and education of the speaker go up the scale”, the “Indianness” of their English accent becomes less marked, so their D’s and T’s sound more like those of non-Indian English speakers: i.e., less dental and more retroflex.
*Hard to know what to call this: I mean the common characteristics of English spoken in former British colonies where most of the inhabitants are at least partly descended from natives of the British Isles and speak English as their first or only language. Of course, within this group there’s still a huge variety of different dialects and accents, but they all differ significantly from the dialects of English spoken in former colonies like India and Hong Kong where English was never a native or ancestral language for most of the inhabitants.
I am not sure if I understand this correctly. There are two alphabets in Hindi - V or Bh - like in Bharat or Bhalu or GarV (womb) and the other being the soft v as in Vinod or Vikas or avtar. Hindi speakers will Victor and Water differently.
I’m not sure I understand what either of you are saying.
Just to be clear here, we are talking about four sets of consonants here—two in English and two in North Indian languages (I’ll call it Hindustani/Bengali for the sake of discussion):
Dental stops (aspirated and unaspirated): [t̪] [t̪ʰ] [d̪] [d̪ʱ]
Retroflex stops (aspirated and unaspirated): [ʈ] [ʈʰ] [ɖ] [ɖʱ]
Hindustani/Bengali speakers think of westerners as being “unable” to pronounce the dental stops and it is very common when imitating a westerner speaking Hindustani or Bengali to replace the dental stops with retroflex stops. Hindustani/Bengali speakers think of the alveolar stops in English as being equivalent to the retroflex stops in Hindustani/Bengali. Indeed, they likely can’t tell the difference between them, the same way that most westerners can’t distinguish between dental stops and alveolar stops.
So, generally, you see this mapping in native speakers of Hindustani/Bengali when speaking English
[θ] —> [t̪ʰ] — Thus, “thin” [θɪn] is pronounced [t̪ʰin] or [t̪ʰɪn]
[ð] —> [d̪] — Thus, “this” [ðɪs] is pronounced [d̪is] or [d̪ɪs]
[t] —> [ʈ] — Thus, “take” [teɪk] is pronounced [ʈek]
[d] —> [ɖ] — Thus, “deep” [dip] is pronounced [ɖip]
American English and English English don’t have either dental or retroflex stops, we pronounce D and T as ‘alveolar’ consonants, with the tongue in between where it would be for a dental and a retroflex consonants. (Dental consonants have the tongue further forward, retroflex ones have the tongue further back). Indian languages have retroflex D and T and dental D and T sounds, but not alveolar ones. Either the dental or retroflex sounds are going to sound ‘foreign’ to an American or British speaker.
I think the deal here is the ‘ecological fallacy’ thing. It’s true that within a particular region, people of low caste origin / darker skin / more ASI ancestry (the three are all correlated to some extent) are going to be poorer and less educated than people of higher caste/lighter skin/more ANI ancestry. But it’s not true that regions with more people of high caste/high ANI ancestry/etc. are necessarily going to be more educated. Brahmins tend to be more educated than non-Brahmins, but Tamil Nadu (with 1% Brahmin population) has much higher education levels than UP (with 10% Brahmins).
Just to try to make clear what I’m saying here, let me restate it this way.
To an English speaker:
— [t̪] [t̪ʰ] [ʈ] [ʈʰ] [t] are all allophones of the single phoneme /t/
— [d̪] [d̪ʱ] [ɖ] [ɖʱ] [d] are all allophones of the single phoneme /d/
— Indians are “unable” to pronounce the separate phonemes /θ/ /ð/ correctly
To a Hindustani/Bengali speaker:
— [t] [ʈ] are allophones of the phoneme /ʈ/
— [d] [ɖ] are allophones of the phoneme /ɖ/
— [t̪ʰ] [θ] are allophones of the phoneme /t̪ʰ/
— [d̪] [ð] are allophones of the phoneme /d̪/
— Westerners are “unable” to pronounce the separate phonemes /t̪/ /t̪ʰ/ /d̪/ /d̪ʱ/ /ʈ/ /ʈʰ/ /ɖ/ /ɖʱ/ correctly
Listen to the newscaster here for what I mean when I am talking about the ways D’s and T’s are pronounced when I am talking about a “polished” accent. In the US this would be the equivalent of a standard newscaster accent (as opposed, e.g.) to a “southern” accent. (Start about 4:00 and listen to the T’s)
It’s not a question of which groups are actually more educated etc; it’s a question of what is considered a more polished or educated accent.
I suppose I could look around for an example of a really retroflexed D and T, but if you are familiar with that part of the world, you’ll know what I mean, and I don’t think you’ll find national broadcaster using those variations nearly as much…
As an example (and speaking as a non linguist, so I won’t pretend to know if it’s dental, alveolar or retroflexed or whatever) notice the marked contrast of the newscaster’s “T” sound to the (Urdu) ٹ . (But definitely not either dental or retroflexed, I don’t think.) I need a Flickr for voice, and you’d get what I’m saying in a heartbeat…
You’re missing the point. In English English and American English, D and T are neither dental nor retroflex, they’re alveolar (in between the other two, spatially). Either a dental or a retroflex stop is going to sound ‘foreign’.
The ‘white’ foreigner announcing the Nobel prize winners in that clip (I can’t tell where he’s from, but European of some variety) is pronouncing his T and D sounds as dental sounds (where an American would use alveolar sounds), and the Indian newscaster is pronouncing them as retroflex ones. They both have accents, just distinct ones.
Exactly. Apu is Hank Azaria (Harry Shearer does Apu’s brother Sanjay and Jan Hooks does Apu’s wife Manjula), as he is for Lou and Drederick Tatum (both black characters), Bumblebee Man, Luigi, Akira, and a ton of crazy white characters. Willie is Dan Castellaneta.
Is there even an Indian voice actor currently working? I can think of an awful lot of voice actors and can’t come up with any.
I’m not sure if my (late) paternal grandmother qualifies as Anglo-Indian, but she might. She and her family had English names, were Anglicans, and she claimed her grandfather was the illegitimate son of a British Army officer. I’m not sure what she self-identified as, and she’s no longer alive so I can’t ask.
Russel Peters is right but not well informed. Anglo-Indians are located in India in places where the British were present in big numbers like army cantonments - like Jhansi, dehradoon, Kanpur etc. in addition to the places he mentions.
I dont care how you want to label the sounds. The female Indian newscaster in that clip pronounces her Ts and Ds markedly differently from what would be considered a less polished/less educated accent. If you can’t hear the difference, I guess you cant hear it. But the way she pronounces T and D is markedly distinct and I would say anyone whose native language is Urdu or Hindi and who has a good ear can distinguish the sounds.
I am not a linguist but to call her pronunciation of a T or D “retroflex” is highly suspect. And within the general alveolar tongue position are markedly different and obvious ways the sound itself actually sounds…
Ah well…I dont know how to make a good written argument for a sound. There is a stereotypical polished/educated Indian accent in the same sense that there is a stereotypical polished/educated accent used by US english-speaking broadcasters. Among the sounds that are avoided is that harder (retroflex) D and T. And many other differences as well, of course.
A direct educational level inference for a given individual is no more made than one would make it for a southern drawl speaker in the US. But that does mean that the casual sterotypical inference of less polish and education is not drawn. The various Indian accents have similar parallels to accents in the US and many other countries (I can think of German, Italian and UK speakers to name a few with which I am personally familiar).
Thanks. ANI and ASI = ‘Ancient North Indian’ and “Ancient South Indian”. A bunch of papers in the last few years have argued that modern South Asians are mostly descended from a mixture of two ancient populations: “Ancient North Indians” were most likely close to Persians and other West Eurasians, while “Ancient South Indians” were closely related to the modern-day Andaman Islanders, and fairly distant from most other modern groups. Some of the studies I’ve seen estimate that, for example, Pashtuns are about 70% of ANI and 30% ASI ancestry, while among low-caste Tamils and some tribal groups it’s the reverse (70% ASI), and most other South Asians are somewhere in between.
