Comment on I notice Indians speaking English tend to speak very fast. Are the Indian languages simply spoken faster?

Nighed@sffa.community ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• da_hooman_husky@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I used to think they spoke English as a second language too but that isn’t always the case. Indian English is its own valid dialect and is a learned way of speaking as a first language. (Source - married an Indian, traveled India, seen some schools there, saw kids/family members studying, etc…)

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  • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Funnily enough, Anglo-Indians have recognized minority status and have their own special designated member of the Indian Parliament

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  • Nighed@sffa.community ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s fair, I read the other comment about it actually being the common language throughout India which is interesting. I guess it’s just a more extreme version of the US/UK/AU English differences, we may differ over time, but should remain close enough to understand 99% of the time

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  My hypothesis in this regard is that English has specially slow vowels because it’s encoding a lot of information in said vowels. As in: they need to be slower to be distinguishable.

  And, when speakers of language A learn language B, they tend to transfer A’s prosody into B. (I believe that this should be uncontroversial as a claim.) That might even get ingrained into a local variety, like Indian English as L1.

  So the hard time that people have understanding those Indian English speakers and L2 English speakers from India would be mostly that they don’t get which vowel the Indian speaker is conveying. For example “bit”, “beet”, “bait” sounding almost identical.

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• someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I have a hard time with Indian accents. I think a part of it is they stringwordstogether and don’t sister separate them.

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  • tipicaldik@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

    Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

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    • someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What do you mean by accent syllables?

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    • MrsDoyle@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Oh that reminded me of one time I was in hospital really sick & an Indian doctor was examining me. She said, “Do you have any wessicles?” Ummm what is that? “Wessicles… I can’t remember the English word…” She tried describing wessicles and it hit me - blisters. “Yes, yes! Blisters!” She had actually been saying vesicles, which to be fair I would have to have looked up if I came across it in a book. We had a good laugh, she diagnosed me correctly, I got the right meds, and I recovered.

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  • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Many Indian languages allow words in a logical unit to be stringed together as long as it sounds okay (so basically, avoid consonant - consonant joining).

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• vodkasolution@feddit.it ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Thanks for the link, I found it very interesting!

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