Per this thread I was intrigued by the notion that the Indian (Asian) English dialect that many Indian tech support workers speak with, is widely used and perfectly understandable between themselves. To be frank I had put my inability to have a naturally flowing conversation with them down to the fact that their English simply wasn’t very good, not that it was simply “different”, and I had assumed they had just recently learned English or that their command of context was poor. Apparently (per the link) this is not the case, and many are long term English speakers, but have a different dialect.
As a background I’ve spoken with English people. Jamaicans, South Africans Australians, Canadians, Irish etc., and Indian professionals in the US, and had perfectly workable flowing conversations. The conversations I’ve had with with Indian tech support workers are another matter entirely, and I’ve found you generally have to speak slowly, very distinctly, and use fairly basic words to be understood, and even then I’m not quite sure I’m communicating.
Is it really just an issue of dialect? I honestly find that bit difficult to believe given the comprehension difficulties I’ve encountered.
IME, it’s so not the pronunciation so much as it is the rhythm and culture gap.
I have recently (Thursday) had an Indian accounts payable clerk, with almost perfectly accented British English, tell me a check was cut, but who was unable to understand my questions about when that check would be recieved. “Approximately when can I expect delivery of this check” turned into “Will the check be mailed or is it an EBT?” which resulted in 15 minutes of discussion about the gender of the payment, the existence of a “Post office” and that “post” has more meanings than credit/debit/finance, and that delivery would not be “special.” She knew what an EBT is.
I know not to use slang, but, dayum, when did “delivery” and 'Post Office" become slang?
The supervisors supervisor understood what I was asking, but had the accent and rhythm which make typical “Indian English” more difficult for American English speakers to follow. I’m good with accents and non-standard english rythyms, but I can understand why non-tone deaf people get frustrated and confused.
I assume that the native language (I don’t know its name) is tonal, and the sing-song rhythm carries into spoken English.
Amerind dialects are more difficult for me, because the almost halting rhythm reminds me of an American English speaker overcoming a slight stammer.
Since I don’t have any factual information to supply, I’ll just link to the Wikipedia article first:
Also a translation guide:
But personally, what my bet would be is that the issue is that English was taught for a long time by people who weren’t exactly fluent–thus building up consistent misusages–and probably an emphasis on book-learning from a few key texts that were not updated since 1900.
Most Indian people that you’re going to be talking to through call centers are second-language English speakers, so you’re getting English through the phonological filters of Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, or what have you. If you’re talking to an Australian or Scottish person, they’re more likely to be a native speaker.
I think you will find the same issue anywhere where English is spoken as a second language (not a foreign language.) The base is an antiquated form of British English, which would already be a little difficult for us to understand perfectly. Then you add the influences of local languages. Finally, leave it somewhat isolated for over a hundred years, giving it a chance to change and evolve on it’s own. In the end, when you give that to someone who doesn’t have much experience with that dialect, it is going to be difficult to understand.
Why don’t we have that problem with British English, etc? One is that we are simply far more exposed to these dialects and have been for generations. We all know what a British guy says when he says “We’ll take the lift to my flat” because generations of media, liturature and pop culture have exposed us to the differences between our dialects. Secondly, the flow of media between countries where English is a first language has a regulatory effect. The different dialects have more of a chance to keep in step with each other and to some degree evolve together. Finally, local languages don’t have an influence when English is the first language.
You will find the same problem in Anglophone parts of Africa. Cameroon has two English speaking states, but I can barely communicate with Anglophones. Even though I’m a novice French speaker, I often end up switching to French when speaking to Anglophones just because it is easier than trying to reconcile our two dialects.
A lot of them don’t move their jaws when speaking English; I’ve even encountered some who would do it when speaking their home language (which varies by zone) but not in English. I’ve never met people from other places who speak moving their mouths as little as the Indians do (some Brits don’t move them much, the ones who make all the vowels sound like some sort of ae hybrid - maybe Indian English derives from those guys?).
Until a few weeks back this was just my personal observation, but I recently caught a travel documentary (Aussie make, I think) which talked about people being taught to “speak American” to work in call centers and the teacher kept emphasizing “move your jaw, move your jaw!” She looked like someone imitating “a Texan’s hot potato talk” for a standup routine.
Some of my coworkers in America were from India. Company policy (created, I think, back when the only people who got transferred between countries were high-level execs with three kids and a SAHW) indicates that foreign workers from countries where English is not the official language must take English lessons; if your country’s language is English, you don’t have the right to English lessons. This led to myself being told “your English would be fine for California or Texas, haha, but we’ll teach you Philadelphia English” (well, gee, the factories I’m assigned to are in Houston, LA and San Francisco, ain’t that nice!) while some of the Indian guys went nuts trying to understand why nobody understood them. Official language and native tongue are not the same, for many people.
I don’t find Indian English to be any harder to understand that some of the more obscure British dialects of English. It’s not clear to me how many speakers of English there are in India. Some sources say that it’s as few as 100 million. Some say that it’s more than 300 million. So at the least there are more English speakers in India than in any other country than in the U.S. At the most, there are more English speakers in India than in the U.S. and the U.K. combined.
The Indian dialect of English is becoming standardized. It’s not just British English mixed with a few American English terms spoken in a funny accent. It’s now slowly becoming a consistent dialect over all of India. You can no more consider Indian English to be some weird variant that has no relevance to the varieties spoken in other English-speaking countries than you can consider American English to be some weird variant of English with no relevance to the general history of English. For all we know, in the future Indian English might become the de facto standard variety of English, with, say, a half a billion speakers, while American and British English are thought of as smaller, less important varieties.
Are you speaking with these people on the telephone? I expect that would make a difference. Speaking face to face involves getting a lot of cues and builds confidence. Even with people I know quite well I have trouble talking about a technical subject on a teleconference.
I often find that there’s a “tuning in” phase with accents and dialects and that after that things become a lot easier. A few face to face conversations with someone I know about a familiar subject of no particular importance usually does the trick for me.
When I visited India I had no problems at all, although some constructions were unfamiliar and lots were flowery.
I think it’s exposure, too. I employed a girl from Delhi in my last job who said at interview she was “wery interested in veb”, but after a week or two working together, we communicated fine.
When I first moved to Hong Kong I couldn’t understand the local ESL dialect. Not just the accent, but idioms like “check da biw pris” (“can I have the check” at the end of a meal), or “wot can I hawp tchoo” from a receptionist (namely “how can I help you?”) - or my favourite: “my hobby is go to shopping” - but by the time I left after a few years, not only could I understand it perfectly, I could speak it too.
I will say that some Indian English speakers are less intelligible than others, but for the most part the more exposure you get, the easier it is to understand. Just be thankful they don’t put the call centers in Jamaica!
Everytime I’m in England I have a problem with this. Some people of Southern Asian extraction have that accent and I find it very hard to understand. I was on a course in London last week and there was a guy there who I couldn’t understand at all. All the other English people attending and the trainer had no problem with it whatsoever so obviously exposure is the key
IMHO the thing that makes Indian English hard for Americans to understand is the LACK of intonation and word stress. In fact, word stress is the number one impediment to comprehension when ESL speakers talk to native speakers. This is particularly true with people whose first language is syllable-timed, rather than stress-timed.
I do medical transcription, so I hear accents from all over the world, and I’ve never had any trouble understanding Indian people speaking English. It’s one of the easier accents for me to understand–considerably easier than Chinese. Those dictating are, of course, highly educated, so I’m wondering if it isn’t something to do with where people are learning to speak English. Is the accent less difficult to understand if English is learned in a university setting?
I’m in IT. I’ve had several Run-ins with Microsoft and Cisco low level tech support crews from India. What I’ve found is:
The operator (Jimmy Vincent…yeah, right) can have perfect diction. I cannot tell that english wasn’t their primary language by accent. But the words just don’t parse into something I understand.
What’s particularly odd is: Once we switched to email (in one case, our schedules didn’t match and I needed to continue troubleshooting), I could understand, completely, what he was communicating.
Now, I’ve also had a number of ‘south of the Mason-dixon like’ operators that were equally hard to understand, to it’s a little disingenuous to just blame India for their tech-support language barriers.
In addition to this possibility, I’ve found that accents tend to come through stronger through electronic media than when face to face. That’s an additional barrier when talking to someone over the phone who’s not a native speaker.
Part of it, I think, is just that’s like 2 layers of indirection for us. They speak British (and British accented) English with an Indian accent. Thus we have to get past both layers of accent to figure out meaning.
Of course, this theory would be shot down if it turns out that British people have the same trouble.
I think there are a number of pronunciation issues that make it difficult for some people to understand “Hinglish”, as it’s commonly called in the Gulf:
[ul]the tendency to swap the “w” and “v” sounds - it’s wery difficult to get a glass of vater here![/ul]
[ul]the strong rolling of “r” sounds - I vant a glass of vaterrrr[/ul]
[ul]the inaccurate/incorrect pronunciation of vowel sounds - bring me some vaah-terrr[/ul]
[ul]the tendency to speak very quickly and (inconsistently) elide certain vowel and even some consonant sounds[/ul]
As an Australian working in the Arabian Gulf, I have no problem with the vocabulary/terminology that Indians use and I am pretty much used to Indian accents now. I still find it much more difficult to understand South Indians (e.g. from Kerala) than Indians from other regions, but I think that must just be a side-effect of the pronunciation/translation issues from Malayalam to English!
Oh gosh, this can be a touchy topic! I had a bad go-round with Indian tech support people last year; I think that my aggravation at not being able to fix the problem I was having only compounded the original problem of not being able to understand what they were saying.
For me, it’s mostly the sing-song rhythm of the dialect that throws me; I also have problems with African dialects as well as Caribbean/Island dialects; as I grow older and my hearing is not as distinct as it once was, it seems to be getting worse. It’s embarassing for both when I end up having to ask someone to repeat themself, sometimes more than once.
Oh yes, I also have problems understanding British (and other UK) English too!
FWIW I find the English spoken by people either in India (on the phone) or from India is generally easy to understand, and the English spoken by people of the Far East is much more difficult.
I was embarrassed once in a Chinese restaurant when I did not know how to answer the question “Chi nee wedg ih ka vaw?” no matter how many times I got the waitress to repeat it. Turns out she was asking if I wanted Chinese vegetables.
I worked for a Korean man for a while, in a government planning office. I would hear him on the phone. He would say, “Dak tah eem. Why I am.” Then he would repeat it again and again, louder each time. After a few of these I figured out he was identifying himself, saying “Dr. Yim. Y - I - M.” But this went on so often that I can only assume that he left an entire constellation of confused telephone conversants out there.