Indian English

When my Accents of English came out nearly thirty years ago, more than one person told me they thought that the last chapter (ch. 9, ‘The Imperial Legacy’) was the weakest. So I was interested to see the publication of a new book in the EUP Dialects of English series, entitled Indian English. It is by Pingali Sailaja of the University of Hyderabad, and contains a substantial chapter on pronunciation.

Sailaja makes a useful distinction between Standard Indian English Pronunciation (SIEP) and various kinds of non-standard pronunciation strongly influenced by the phonetics of the speaker’s L1. On the question of rhoticity, for example, where I wrongly said that “most speakers have a more or less fully rhotic pronunciation” (p. 629), this author asserts that SIEP is non-rhotic, but “most non-standard varieties of IE are rhotic”, although “there are those whose speech would be somewhere in the middle of the cline but they may still have non-rhotic speech” (p. 20). So he she sees nonrhoticity as standard, but rhoticity as a strong marker of non-standard speech.

In Indian English p t k are well-known to be unaspirated. With the exception of Tamil, Indian languages have a phonemic opposition between aspirated and unaspirated plosives. This is exploited for the voiceless th sound: we regularly get aspirated t̪ʰ where other varieties of English have θ. (Indian languages have no dental fricatives, nor usually does SIEP: “the sound /θ/ is sometimes articulated in SIEP but /ð/ is almost completely missing”.) If you hear a speaker of SIEP pronounce thing as t̪ɪŋ rather than as the usual Indian t̪ʰɪŋ, that probably means he or she is a speaker of Tamil.

Sailaja points out that if the aspiration of voiceless th were due purely to the influence of spelling we might expect d̪ɦ as the counterpart of ð: but in words such as this, mother, bathe we in fact get plain d̪. Then again, though, we do get ɦ in ghastly, ghost and also in John and sometimes in why wɦaɪ, which must certainly be due to the spelling.

Our stereotype of Indian English (or my stereotype, at least) has v and w merged as ʋ, with no distinction between vet and wet. Sailaja asserts, however, that “the distinction is maintained in SIEP”. He She thinks of this as a spelling-based distinction, which is reasonable — though it’s not how we core English speakers think of it, and not how it arose historically. Non-standard varieties of IE do not maintain the distinction.

The advertisement for a recent Hindi film that says ‘villager, visionary, winner’ is obviously meant to be alliterative.

And so finally to linking and intrusive r. The Indians are different from the English.