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

Submitted ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨someguy3@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does, and they are simply trying to match the cadence?

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merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
One way of classifying languages is grouping them into stress-timed, syllable-timed and “mora”-timed languages.

Stress timed languages (like English) are ones where the time between stressed syllables is roughly the same. Take the phrase “I went to the store with my friend John”. Most native English speakers will stress “went”, “store”, “friend” and “John”. It might not be a big difference, but you’ll notice the “to the” between “went” and “store” is rushed, and that there’s a sort of gap between “friend” and “John” since both are stressed.

Many Romance languages are seen as syllable-timed, where each syllable takes the same amount of time. In French that phrase is “Je suis allé au magasin avec mon ami John”, that’s 14 syllables, all roughly the same timing. In Spanish it’s “Fui a la tienda con mi amigo John”, 12 syllables. Unless you’re really drawing attention to one of the words, every syllable there gets roughly the same timing.

Japanese is mora timed, which is pretty similar to being syllable timed, except that when you encounter double-letters they double the length of the syllable. So, “Just a moment please” is “Chottomatte kudasai”, where the syllables with double-t letters take twice as long.

The 4 most widely spoken languages in India are Hindi (way out in front with 44% of the population speaking it as a first language), followed by Bengali, Marathi and Telugu (with about 6-8% each) The first 3 are all Indo-Aryan languages, and Telugu is a Dravidian language. The 3 Indo-Aryan languages are considered to be syllable-timed and Telugu is considered to be mora-timed.

IMO, what makes Indian-inflected English seem fast is that they’re adopting the syllable / mora timing from their primary language and using it in English. That means they spend less time on syllables / words that English speakers would stress and more time on the un-stressed syllables. The overall timing of what they say is probably similar, but in evening out the length of the syllables, they take time away from the syllables that other English speakers naturally slow down to stress. Since you tend to notice the stressed words more, since they’re rushed it seems like the entire sentence is rushed.

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- threeduck@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  BestOfLemmy
  
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- Dragster39@feddit.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thank you, that was a good and interesting start of the day
  
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- Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is a fantastic explanation. Thank you.
  
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- NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Great explanation, thank you!
  
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- tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I remember seeing a linguist doing research into the actual timing of long Japanese vowels and finding that they weren’t actually double the length, more like 1.5 times as long (or 1.7 or something like that). I’ll have to see if I can find the article or paper again.
  
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  - merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah, that makes sense. It seems hard to lengthen a vowel out like that unless you’re actually chanting or something and are keeping to a specific rhythm.
    
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- ilinamorato@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower. Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
  
  Is there anything to that? Or was that just nonsense?
  
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  - merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Someone posted a link to just that topic here. Apparently almost all languages transmit about 39 bits per second of data. Italians use 9 syllables per second, Germans only about 5-6, but both convey the same amount of information per second. But, not all syllables are equal. Japanese has about 5 bits per syllable, English has about 7 bits per syllable. The most information dense language per syllable is apparently Vietnamese with about 8 bits per syllable.
    
    Apparently though, the bottleneck is the brain. The end result seems to be that languages that have fewer “bits of data” per syllable say those syllables more quickly, and the ones with fewer bits of data per syllable say those syllables more slowly, so that the average is about 39 bits per second no matter what the language.
    
    Having said that, I often listen to podcasts sped up to 1.5x speed, and I listen to podcasts while doing other things, so I guess the bottleneck is probably on the sending side rather than the receiving side.
    
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  - actual_patience@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower.
    
    This is true.
    
    Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
    
    I don’t think that’s the right interpretation. There are words in English that would require sentences to be made for each if conveyed in a different language. But the same is true vice-versa.
    
    Have a look at subtitles for movies from one language to any other. Translators struggle conveying what should be paragraph long sentences of context behind a single word for one language. Do not get me started on double speak.
    
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  - LotrOrc@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Fairly nonsense If anything I’d say it’s the other way around – there are lots of words in Hindi/Malayalam that you need 5 or 6 English words to describe
    
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Nighed@sffa.community ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I read something ( similar to this) about the maximum data transfer D per second in different languages being basically the same.

Some languages with less nuance, or fewer letters/syllables have less information per syllable, but tend to speak faster, while more ‘complicated’ languages have more information per syllable, but tend to speak slower.

The general trend was a maximum amount of speech ‘data’ that could be processed by an average human brain per second.

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- da_hooman_husky@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨8⁩ ⁨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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  - emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨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 ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks for the link, I found it very interesting!
  
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Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I work in maritime, often alongside Indian counterparts who speak both English to me and Indian to their ship mates.

Yes, they do speak Indian just as fast. Yes, the way they speak English has a lot to do with the cadence of how they speak their native language.

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- HappyRedditRefugee@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There is no “indian” languaje, there is a myriad of languajes spoken in india, what you might be refering to is hindi, which is very wildly spoken.
  
  I have two indian friends that speak english with each other cause their native languajes are so different that they do no understand each other and one of then do no speak hindi.
  
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  - Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I figured that was the case, but I don’t know any of it, so I didn’t know better. Thanks for clarifying.
    
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da_hooman_husky@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
English (for various reasons) is kinda the only common language throughout India. There isn’t actually one non-English language that you can learn and be understood throughout India, (e.g. if someone from the state of Punjab goes to the state of Tamil Nadu, they likely might need to speak English to understand each other though there are always exceptions to this) so English is very commonly spoken throughout India. As with any English speaking country, the language has changed within India and Southeast Asia over time. Many of the other languages spoken throughout India are more strict in their phonetics, e.g. each syllable has a specific sound and doesn’t change based on the surrounding syllables. Many English speakers who learn in India likely end up using this kind of speech pattern with English as well, leading to a different cadence in pronunciation than in other regions of the world. There are times it sounds faster, but pay attention and see if you can notice if the person speaking is using more syllables or pronouncing parts of the word you might skip over in the same word, but just faster.

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- Sternhammer@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Re: dickie for car boot (what Americans would call the ‘trunk’); some old two-seater cars had a third seat in the boot, known as a ‘dickie-seat’, at least in the UK, so perhaps it’s an old term that still survives in Indian English.
  
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  - merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It goes back even further than that.
    
    An 1865 dictionary of American English uses “boot” instead of “trunk” to refer to the… well trunks that were strapped to the front and back of a coach. (A coach being a specific kind of horse-drawn carriage, which takes its name from the village of Kocs in Hungary where they were popular.)
    
    archive.org/details/…/2up
    
    www.etymonline.com/word/coach
    
    In that 1865 dictionary, a Dickey (or Dicky) is defined as “A seat behind a carriage, for servants &c”, and a Rumble as “A boot with a seat above it for servants, behind a carriage.”
    
    archive.org/details/…/2up
    
    So, originally in American English, the trunks strapped to the outside of a carriage were called “boots”, and the seats above them were “rumbles”, and maybe when there was no “boot”, just a seat for servants they were called “dickies”.
    
    In Indian English somehow the “seat on the outside of a carriage” became the “compartment in the back of a vehicle for storing things”. In British English they kept the name “boot” when it changed from an external box to a box that was part of the vehicle itself. And, in American English, they switched to calling it a “trunk”, most likely before it actually became part of the vehicle.
    
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- Vilian@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  i didn’t know about that side of india, thanks for sharing!
  
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lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The oddity here is English, not the languages spoken in India. It’s easy to show it by comparing vowel duration in a few languages:

Telugu (Dravidian) - short vowels are 70~90ms, long vowels 180~195ms

Hindi (Indo-European) - vowels are 100~180ms long

Spanish (Indo-European) - vowels are 130~150ms long (NB: I’m analysing the data for native speakers)

Japanese (Japonic) - tables IV-V show some data for a short /a/, 70~112ms. I’d expect the long vowels to be thus around 140~220ms, if simply doubling it (Japanese is mostly moraic after all, and open vowels tend to be longer)

English (Indo-European) - 85~420ms

So yes, your typical language spoken in India is spoken faster than English. That doesn’t say much because probably most languages are spoken faster than English.

Also, keep in mind that “Indian languages” isn’t that useful of a label. It’s a lot like lumping together Basque, Italian, Russian, Hungarian and Maltese as “European languages” - sure, it can be done, but odds are that you won’t get any meaningful conclusion out of it, you know?
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- someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Well I don’t know enough to differentiate “that’s a Sanskrit accent” and “that’s a Hindi accent” etc.
  
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  - lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The key here is that you’ll probably find the exact same “oddity” among speakers of other languages, even outside India.
    
    I think British English put more and longer emphasis on vowels. It’s almost like they speak in vowels only. Compared to Canadian English, Indian accents are still fast.
    
    I feel like you might have unearthed something interesting here.
    
    The English varieties spoken in those countries like Canada, Belize, USA, Jamaica, etc. had plenty recent interaction with multiple local languages; specially Canada with French. On the other hand, what people usually call “British English” is mostly Standard Southern British (up/middle class, around London), a bit too far away from any meaningful linguistic influence.
    
    So I’m wondering if the pattern that you noticed for Indian speakers and for the others isn’t actually the same pattern. I’m just hypothesising though, this might be incorrect.
    
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  - emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The problem is that Indian languages belong to three or four language families. In contrast, all European languages (except Basque, Hungarian and Finnish) belong to one language family.
    
    Put another way, Hindi, Sanskrit and English are more similar to each other (all Indo-European) than any of them are to Ladakhi (Sino-Tibetan), Munda (Austroasiatic) or Tamil (Dravidian).
    
    When an Indian speaks English as a second language, it will be influenced by their first language. But the effect of Punjabi would be quite different from that of Telegu, which in turn would be quite different from that of Zo.
    
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  - MrsDoyle@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You haven’t met the man from Strabane, have you? youtu.be/XhGbpatmplQ?feature=shared
    
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Vanshaj@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m not an expert on this, and I’m not trying to sound I know everything, but I’m an Indian and have spent 20 years of my life speaking Hindi, which is one of the widely known and spoken language in India, especially in North India. I think this is related to how the language is structured and the way consonants and vowels are used in the “Lipi” (I wasn’t able to find an English word for it, but you think of it as the set of symbols with which the language is written.) of Indian languages. The Lipi for Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Maithli and many other languages is Devnagari. And It has a somewhat complex structure to it, more complex than English. Like English has 5 vowels and are used directly in the middle of consonants. But in Devnagari, you can see there are traditionally 13 vowels and every vowel can be used independently or dependently in a word, which means you can have a vowel appended or pretended to each consonant, and that will produce a different sound. A kid in India in his early age is taught to identify each of that sound and he uses all that early knowledge and learning, all his life when he talks. This allows him to create and follow different sound patterns and makes his speech continuous and flow-full, which I think you’re referring to as being fast. I find other languages like Mandarin has a similar structure, and makes me learn about them even more.

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- baatliwala@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Lipi is basically alphabet bhai (or written script)
  
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- joel_feila@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  well correction English has 20 vowels, depending on dialect
  
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  - merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Vowel has 2 definitions that conflict.
    
    One definition is the letters ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, and ‘u’ (and sometimes ‘y’). The other is the speech sound without any blockage or constricting of the vocal tract. Vowel letters are used in written English to indicate vowel sounds, but because English is a pain in the ass, there’s no 1 to 1 match between the 5(ish) vowel letters and the 20+ vowel sounds.
    
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  - Vanshaj@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    As I said I don’t know much about the topic, I presented my thoughts.
    
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whotookkarl@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m curious even with the different ways of stressing syllables if there is also a casual link between population density and speaking speed, similar to walking speed differences measured in rural and urban environments. Like if there is some mechanism like walking quickly to get through timed crosswalks vs larger group conversations with less time to get your point across or jump in without interrupting.

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johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think this is just a dialectical thing. For comparison listen to a Mexican speaking Spanish vs someone from Spain. Very different cadence.

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dutchkimble@lemy.lol ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think there’s a vast difference in south India and north India. South Indians tend to speak a lot faster.

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- emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There was a recent paper saying exactly this.
  
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