Spelling pronunciation and Supra-segmental features

Spelling pronunciation

A number of distinctive features of Indian English are due to "the vagaries of English spelling". Most Indian languages, unlike English, have a nearly phonetic pronunciation with respect to their script, so the spelling of a word is a highly reliable guide to its modern pronunciation. Indians' tendency to pronounce English phonetically as well can cause divergence from Western English. For example, "jewellery" is pronounced /dʒʋeləri:/ and "jewel" as /dʒʋel/ where Western Anglophones might omit the final e, pronouncing them as/dʒʋelri:/ and /dʒʋl/.

§  In words where the digraph <gh> represents a voiced velar plosive (/ɡ/) in other accents, some Indian English speakers supply a murmured version [ɡʱ], for example <ghost>[ɡʱo:st]. No other accent of English admits this voiced aspiration.

§  Similarly, the digraph <wh> may be aspirated as [ʋʱ] or [wʱ], resulting in realizations such as <which> [ʋʱɪtʃ], found in no other English accent (except in certain parts of Scotland).

§  In unstressed syllables, native English varieties will mostly use the schwa while Indian English would use the spelling vowel, making <sanity> sound as [‘sæniti] instead of [‘sænəti]. Similarly, <above> and <ago> can be heard as [e:’bəv] and [e:’ɡo:] instead of [ə’bʌv] and [ə’ɡoʊ].

§  English words ending in grapheme < a > almost always have the < a > being pronounced as schwa /ə/ in native varieties (exceptions include words such as <spa>). But in Indian English, the ending < a > is pronounced as the long open central unrounded vowel /aː/ (as in <spa>) instead of schwa. So, <India> is pronounced as /’ɪnɖɪa:/ instead of /’ɪndɪə/, and <sofa> as /’so:fa:/ instead of /’soʊfə/.

§  The word "of" is usually pronounced with a /f/ instead of a /v/ as in most other accents.

§  Use of [d] instead of [t] for the "-ed" ending of the past tense after voiceless consonants, for example "developed" may be [‘dɛʋləpd] instead of RP /dɪ:vɛləpt/.

§  Use of [s] instead of [z] for the "-s" ending of the plural after voiced consonants, for example <dogs> may be [daɡs] instead of [dɒɡz].

§  Pronunciation of <house> as [hauz] in both the noun and the verb, instead of [haus] as noun and [hauz] as verb.

§  The digraph <tz> is pronounced as [tz] or [tdʒ] instead of [ts] (voicing may be assimilated in the stop too), making <Switzerland> sound like [‘sʋɪtzərlænd] instead of [‘swɪtsəɹlənd].

§  In RP, /r/ occurs only before a vowel. But many speakers of Indian English use /r/ in almost all positions in words as dictated by the spellings. The allophone used is a mild trill or a tap. Indian speakers do not typically use the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ for <r>, which is common for American English speakers.

§  All consonants are distinctly doubled (lengthened) in General Indian English wherever the spelling suggests so. e.g., <drilling> /’drilliŋɡ/.

§  English pronunciation of the grapheme < i > varies from [ɪ] to [aɪ] depending upon the dialect or accent. Indian English will invariably use the British dialect for it. Thus, <tensile> would be pronounced as [‘tɛnsaɪl] like the British, rather than [‘tɛnsɪl] like the American; <anti> would be pronounced as [‘ænti] like the British, rather than [‘æntaɪ] like American.

Supra-segmental features

Any of the native varieties of English produce unique stresses on the language. English is a stress-timed language, and both syllable stress and word stress, where only certain words in a sentence or phrase are stressed, are important features of Received Pronunciation. Indian native languages are actually syllable-timed languages, like Latin and French. Indian-English speakers usually speak with a syllabic rhythm. Further, in some Indian languages, stress is associated with a low pitch, whereas in most English dialects, stressed syllables are generally pronounced with a higher pitch. Thus, when some Indian speakers speak, they appear to put the stress accents at the wrong syllables, or accentuate all the syllables of a long English word. Certain Indian accents are of a "sing-song" nature, a feature seen in a few English dialects in Britain, such as Scouse andWelsh English. 

Vowels and Consonants

Indian accents vary greatly. Some Indians speak English with an accent very close to a Standard British (Received Pronunciation) accent (though not the same); others lean toward a more 'vernacular', native-tinted, accent for their English speech.

Vowels

In general, Indian English has fewer peculiarities in its vowel sounds than the consonants, especially as spoken by native speakers of languages like Hindi, the vowel phoneme system having some similarities with that of English. Among the distinctive features of the vowel-sounds employed by some Indian English speakers are:

-  Many Indian languages do not natively possess a separate phoneme /æ/ (as in RP <trap>). Thus, many speakers do not differentiate between the vowel sounds /ɛ/ (as in "dress") and /æ/ (as in <trap>), except in cases where a minimal pair such as <bed>/<bad> exists in the vocabulary of the speaker. Such a speaker might pronounce "tax" like the first syllable of "Texas". Speakers of Southern languages and Sinhalese, which do differentiate /ɛ/ and /æ/, do not have difficulty making this distinction. Eastern IE languages, notably Bengali does have the /æ/ sound for both the vowels ā আ (hāñcco—the sneezing sound—pronounced as hæñcco) and /e/ এ (henglā—greedy—pronounced as hængla). The vowel a অ has two sound values in Bengali:as au in aura (tatkāl) and as o ও (Kalikātā). It lacks the short vowel value for a অ (parāthā). Nowadays most Indian students learn English from childhood which enables them to produce almost all phonetics used in English.

-  Chiefly in Punjab and Haryana states and western Uttar Pradesh, the short [ɛ] becomes lengthened and higher to long [e:], making <pen> sound like <paenn>.

-  When a long vowel is followed by "r", some speakers of Indian English usually use a monophthong, instead of the diphthong used for many such words in many other accents. Thus "fear" is pronounced [fir] instead of [fiə].

-  Indian English often uses strong vowels where other accents would have unstressed syllables or words. Thus "cottage" may be pronounced [‘kate:dʒ] rather than [‘kɒtɪdʒ]. A word such as "was" in the phrase "I was going" will be pronounced [ʋɒz] or [ʋas] in Indian English: in most other accents it would receive the unstressed realization [wəz].Another example is that many Indian English speakers often pronounce <the> as /d̪iː/, irrespective of whether the definite article comes before a vowel or a consonant, or whether it is stressed or not. In native varieties of English, <the> is pronounced as [ðə] when it is unstressed and lies before a consonant, and as [ði:] when it is before a vowel or when stressed even before a consonant.

-  Continuing the above point, the indefinite article <a> is often pronounced by many Indian English speakers as [e:], irrespective of whether it is stressed or unstressed. In native varieties of English, <a> is pronounced as [ə] when unstressed and as [eɪ] when stressed.

-  The RP vowels /ʌ/, /ə/ and /ɜ:/ might be realized as /ə/ in Indian English. Bengalis often pronounce all these vowels as /a/, including the <r>-colored versions of these vowels. Thus, <firm> may be pronounced the same as [farm], <van> as [bʰan], etc.

-  General Indian English realizes /eɪ/ (as in <face>) and /oʊ/ (as in <goat>) as long monophthongs [e:], [o:].

-  Many Indian English speakers do not make a clear distinction between /ɒ/ and /ɔ:/.

-  Unlike British, but like American English, some Indian speakers don't pronounce the rounded /ɒ/ or /ɔ:/, and substitute /a/ instead. This makes <not> sound as [nat]. The phoneme /ɔ:/, if used, is only semi-rounded at the lips. Similarly in South India "Coffee" will be pronounced kaafi, "Copy" will be kaapi etc.

- Words such as <class>, <staff> and <last> would be pronounced with a back <a> as in British English but unlike American English, i.e., [klɑːs], [stɑːf], and [lɑːst] rather than American [klæ:s], [stæ:f], and [læ:st] and in South of India "Parent" is [‘pɑ:rent].

-  Most Indians have the Trap–bath split of Received Pronunciation. Those who aren't usually influenced by American accents; not using the trap–bath split is often popularly construed as attempting to imitate an American accent.

Consonants

Among the most distinctive features of consonants in Indian English are:

-  Most pronunciations of Indian English are rhotic, but many speakers with higher education are non-rhotic.

-  Standard Hindi and most other vernaculars (except Punjabi & Bengali) do not differentiate between /v/ (voiced labiodental fricative) and /w/ (voiced labiovelar approximant). Instead, many Indians use a frictionless labio-dental approximant [ʋ] for words with either sound, possibly in free variation with [v] and/or [w]. Thus, wet and vet are homophones.

-  Because of the previous characteristic many Indians pronounce words such as <flower> as [fla:(r)] instead of [flaʊə(r)], and <our> as [aː(r)] instead of [aʊə(r)].

-  The voiceless plosives /p/, /t/, /k/ are always unaspirated in Indian English, whereas in RP, General American and most other English accents they are aspirated in word-initial or stressed syllables. Thus "pin" is pronounced [pɪn] in Indian English but [pʰɪn] in most other accents. In native Indian languages (except Tamil), the distinction between aspirated and unaspirated plosives is phonemic, and the English stops are equated with the unaspirated rather than the aspirated phonemes of the local languages. The same is true of the voiceless postalveolar afficate /tʃ/.

-  The alveolar stops English /d/, /t/ are often retroflex [ɖ], [ʈ], especially in the South of India. In Indian languages there are two entirely distinct sets of coronal plosives: onedental and the other retroflex. To the Indian ears, the English alveolar plosives sound more retroflex than dental. 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 Pradeshand Madhya Pradesh) 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 plosive to voiced retroflex flap, and the nasal /n/ to a nasalized retroflex flap.

-  Many Indians speaking English do not use the voiced postalveolar fricative (/ʒ/). Typically, /z/ or /dʒ/ is substituted, e.g. treasure /’trɛzə:r/, and in the south Indian variants, with /ʃ/ as in <"sh'"ore>, e.g. treasure /’trɛʃər/.

-  All major native languages of India lack the dental fricatives (/θ/ and /ð/; spelled with th). Usually, the aspirated voiceless dental plosive [t̪ʰ] is substituted for /θ/ and the unaspirated voiced dental plosive [d̪], or possibly the aspirated version [d̪ʱ]. is substituted for /ð/. For example, "thin" would be realized as [t̪ʰɪn] instead of /θɪn/.

-  South Indians tend to curl the tongue (retroflex accentuation) more for /l/ and /n/.

-  Most Indian languages (except Urdu variety) lack the voiced alveolar fricative /z/. While they do have its nearest equivalent: the unvoiced /s/, strangely, it is not used in substitution. Instead, /z/ is substituted with the voiced palatal affricate (or postalveolar) /dʒ/, just as with a Korean accent. This makes words such as <zero> and <rosy> sound as [‘dʒi:ro] and [‘ro:dʒi:]. This replacement is equally true for Persian and Arabic loanwords into Hindi. The probable reason is the confusion created by the use of the devanagarigrapheme < ज > (for /dʒ/) with a dot beneath it to represent the loaned /z/ (as < ज़ >). This is common among people without formal English education.

-  Many Indians with lower exposure to English also may pronounce / f / as aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive [pʰ]. Again note that in Hindi (devanagari) the loaned / f / from Persian and Arabic is written by putting a dot beneath the grapheme for native [pʰ] < फ >: < फ़ >. This substitution is rarer than that for [z], and in fact in many Hindi-speaking areas /f/ is replacing /pʰ/ even in its native words.

-  Inability to pronounce certain (especially word-initial) consonant clusters by people of rural backgrounds. This is usually dealt with by epenthesis. e.g., school /is’ku:l/, similar to Spanish.

-  Sometimes, Indian speakers interchange /s/ and /z/, especially when plurals are being formed, as opposed to international varieties of English, where [s] is used for pluralization of a word ending in a voiceless consonant, [z] for that ending in a voiced consonant or vowel, and [ɨz] for that ending in a sibilant.

-  Again, in dialects like Bhojpuri, all instances of /ʃ/ are spoken like [s], a phenomenon which is also apparent in their English. Exactly the opposite is seen for manyBengalis.

§- In case of the postalveolar affricates /tʃ/ /dʒ/, native languages like Hindi have corresponding affricates articulated from the palatal region, rather than postalveolar, and they have more of a stop component than fricative; this is reflected in their English.

-  While retaining /ŋ/ in the final position, Indian speakers usually include the [ɡ] after it. Hence /’riŋiŋ/ → /’riŋɡiŋɡ/ (ringing).

-  Syllabic /l/, /m/ and /n/ are usually replaced by the VC clusters [əl], [əm] and [ən] (as in button /’buʈʈən/), or if a high vowel precedes, by [il] (as in little /ˈliʈʈil/). Syllable nuclei in words with the spelling er (a schwa in RP and an r-colored schwa in GA) are also replaced VC clusters. e.g., meter, /’mi:tər/ → /’mi:ʈər/.

-  Indian English uses clear [l] in all instances like Irish English whereas other varieties use clear [l] in syllable-initial positions and dark [l] (velarized-L) in coda and syllabic positions.