Indian English: Indian English represents the group of English dialects spoken in the Republic of India. It varies in terms of the proficiency in acquisition, regional or mother tongue and ethnic background of the users. The regional or geographical variation among these English dialects is great, given the presence of over 120 major languages in the country. The Standard IndianEnglish accent generally refers to the kind spoken at the upper end of the society with higher prestige, intelligibility and educational level. It is used as a standard for education, media and communication. Its phonological features reflect a certain degree of influence from Hindi and other Indian languages, whereas Indian English vocabulary has been loaned/taken from Portuguese, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit.
Task 1)
Watch the video and pay attention to the content and the speech of each character, before attempting to answer the questions.
Q1. Match the Standard English vocabulary items to the Indian English coinages of the same meaning.
Q.2 What are the distinctive phonological features of Indian English accent? Choose more than one.
Consonants /v/ – /w/ merging (e.g. vet and wet are pronounced the same) (i.e. homophones)
The consonant /r/ being pronounced as a retroflex trilled [ɽ͡r] (e.g. enginee/r/ing ➜ enginee[ɽ͡r]ing)
Glottalisation: a glottal stop /ʔ/ is used as a realisation of word- or morpheme-final /p t k/ when followed by a consonant (e.g. Scotland is being pronounced as Sco/ʔ/land)
Consonants /t/, /d/ deletion (e.g. He tol_ a joke which they don’_ know)
The voiceless plosives /p t k/ are often unaspirated (e.g. pin is pronounced as [pɪn] rather than [pʰɪn])
