Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?
I read something ( similar to this) about the maximum data transfer 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.
No idea how this would relate to second languages, and how people with ‘fast’ languages react to speaking ‘slow’ ones. Would be cool to see some data/research on it. Anocdotally, a lot of people struggle to understand Indians speaking English, is that because of the accent and/or poor English (second language, don’t diss them!) or because they are speaking faster than our natural language data speed?
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…)
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
I have a hard time with Indian accents. I think part of it is they stringwordstogether and don’t separate them.
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…
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.
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. That goes side-to-side with what you said about “faster than our natural language data speed”, as they’re effectively encoding more info into a certain amount of time than other speakers are able to decode.
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 ALL of 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 (there is regional slang/expressions/colloquialisms unique to SE Asia like calling the ‘truck’ or ‘boot’ of a car the ‘dickie/dicky’). 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.
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.
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.)
https://archive.org/details/americandictiona00websuoft/page/152/mode/2up
https://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.”
https://archive.org/details/americandictiona00websuoft/page/1156/mode/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.
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?
Well I don’t know enough to differentiate “that’s a Sanskrit accent” and “that’s a Hindi accent” etc.
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.
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 other languages; specially Canada with French and Belize with Spanish. 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 two patterns aren’t actually the same pattern. I’m just hypothesising though, this might be incorrect.
You haven’t met the man from Strabane, have you? https://youtu.be/XhGbpatmplQ?feature=shared
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.
I think this is just a dialectical thing. For comparison listen to a Mexican speaking Spanish vs someone from Spain. Very different cadence.
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.
As far as the flow goes, I’ve noticed that Indian does flow better than English just listening to it, but I don’t know enough of it to make that observation with any credibility.
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.
I figured that was the case, but I don’t know any of it, so I didn’t know better. Thanks for clarifying.
