The group of English dialects spoken largely in the Indian subcontinent is known as Indian English.
English is an official language of India and is frequently used in spoken and literary contexts as a result of colonial domination by the British Raj up to Indian independence in 1947. As India's economy grew quickly towards the end of the 20th century, a great number of people moved throughout the Indian subcontinent, and English became a common language among those who spoke different mother tongues.
Speakers of English in the Indian subcontinent learn it as a first language in English medium schools and as a second language in regional language medium schools, with the exception of the tiny Anglo-Indian community and some families of full Indian ethnicity where English is the primary language spoken in the home. The majority of courses are taught in the native language in smaller towns and villages, with English language instruction provided as a modular subject only in larger cities' English medium schools. Because English is the primary language of instruction in science and technical fields, the majority of university graduates in these fields speak the language fairly well.
Depending on the local language of the speakers, idiomatic idioms drawn from Indian literary and vernacular language have integrated into Indian English in various ways. However, there is still a basic uniformity in the phonetics, vocabulary, and phraseology of the various Indian English dialect varieties.
Introduction
Hindi was established as India's first official language upon its independence in 1947, and efforts were made to make Hindi the country's only official tongue. Tamil Nadu and other non-Hindi-speaking states objected, hence it was decided to keep English as the official language until at least 1965. However, by the end of this time, opposition from non-Hindi states was still too great to succeed in making Hindi the only official language. The English Language Amendment Bill recognised this and stated that English would remain an associate language "until such time as all non-Hindi States had agreed to its being dropped." Since English is now seen as almost vital, this has never happened. For example, it is the only dependable method of daily communication between the federal government and the states that do not speak Hindi.
The English language has adapted to the regional dialects as a result of its widespread use in India. It is possible, though, for different people in various parts of India to have distinct meanings for the same English phrase due to the enormous diversity of Indian languages and cultures.
Grammar
It is far from simple how English fits into India's complex multilingual society; speakers across the nation use it to varying degrees of proficiency, and its syntax and phraseology may resemble that of the speaker's native tongue. Indian speakers of English commonly translate words and phrases literally from their original tongues, but this is much less prevalent among good speakers, and the grammar itself tends to be relatively similar to Standard British English.
Phonology
India has a wide range of accents. Some Indians gravitate towards a more "vernacular" accent for their English speaking, which has a native tinge. However, this accent is not identical to the Standard British (Received Pronunciation) accent.
Vowels
The vowel phoneme system in languages like Hindi shares certain parallels with that of English. However, Indian English generally has fewer anomalies in its vowel sounds than in its consonants, especially when spoken by native speakers of those languages. Some of the distinguishing characteristics of the vowel sounds used by some Indian English speakers include:
• Many English speakers from India struggle to distinguish between the sounds // and //.
(See the merger of cots.)
• Some Indian speakers, particularly in the South, frequently omit the rounded // or // sound and pronounce it as /a/, unlike British speakers, like some Americans.
This does not appear to be. The phoneme // is only slightly rounded at the lips if utilised.
Similar pronunciations for coffee, copy, and other words can be found in South India.
Words like class, staff, and last would be pronounced with a back /a/, similar to Southern British dialects but different from Northern British dialects and standard American English, i.e., and rather than American, and.
The trap-bath split of received pronunciation is used by the majority of Indians.
the consonants' pronunciations in Indian English vary between rhotic and non-rhotic, with some pronunciations imitating British Received Pronunciation and others leaning towards native phonology and being mainly non-rhotic.
• Voiced labiodental fricative (/v/) and voiced labiovelar approximants (/w/) are not distinguished in standard Hindi or most other vernaculars (with the exception of Punjabi, Marathi, and Bengali). For words with any sound, many Indians instead utilize a frictionless labio-dental approximant, sometimes in free variation with and/or depending on locale. Wet and vet are so frequently homophones. In keeping with the preceding trait, many Indians favour pronouncing words like "flower" and "our" as opposed to "to." Despite not being present in all American dialects, this characteristic can be found in some British, South African, and Pakistani English varieties.
• The voiceless plosives /p/, /t/, and /k/ are always unaspirated in Indian English. However, they are aspirated in word-initial or stressed syllables in RP, General American, and most other English accents. Thus, unlike most other dialects, Indian English pronounces "pin" as "pin". The distinction between aspirated and unaspirated plosives is phonemic in native Indian languages (with the exception of Tamil), and the English stops are equated with the unaspirated rather than the aspirated phonemes of the local languages. The voiceless postal veolar affiliate/t/ has the same characteristics. In English, the alveolar stops /d/ and /t/ are frequently retroflex, notably in the southern region of India.
The dental and retroflex coronal plosives are two completely separate sets found in Indian languages. The English alveolar plosives sound more retroflex than dental to Indian ears. All English alveolar plosives are represented as their retroflex equivalents in Hindi's Devanagari script. One compelling explanation for this is that Hindi lacks real retroflex plosives, unlike the majority of other native Indian languages (Tiwari, [1955] 2001). Hindi's supposedly retroflexes are actually apical post-alveolar plosives, occasionally even tending to descend to the alveolar region. As a result, Hindi speakers typically cannot tell their own apical post-alveolar plosives from English's alveolar plosives.
True retroflex plosives, on the other hand, are only found in some languages, like Tamil, and they are pronounced by curving the tongue upward and backwards at the roof of the mouth. Additionally, this results in the /s/ before the alveolar /t/ in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar changing allophonic ally to (stop> /stp/ / ap/). Some speakers allophonically alter the a voiced retroflex plosives to a voiced retroflex flap and the nasal /n/ to a nasalised retroflex flap, primarily in south India.
• Indian English speakers frequently omit the voiced postalveolar fricative (//).
Some Indians substitute /z/ or /d/ instead, as in the word "treasure" (/trzr/), and in the south Indian dialects, // as in "sh'"ore>, as in the word "treasure" (/trr/).
• The dental fricatives (// and //; written with a th) are absent from all of India's major native languages, with the exception of Bengali. In the north, the voiceless dental plosive is typically substituted for // (it would be unaspirated in the south), and the voiced dental plosive, either unaspirated or potentially aspirated, is substituted for //.For instance, "thin" would be pronounced unaspirated in the south and realized as instead of /n/ for North Indian speakers.
• For the sounds /l/ and /n/, South Indians frequently twist their tongues (retroflex accentuation).
The voiced alveolar fricative /z/ is absent from the majority of Indian languages, with the exception of Urdu. Thus, a sizeable part of Indians frequently utilize the voiced palatal affricate (or postalveolar) /d/, much like a Korean accent, despite the fact that their native languages do have their closest equivalent: the unvoiced /s/. As a result, terms like "zero" and "rosy" sound like and (the latter, particularly in the North). This substitution is true for Hindi loanwords from both Persian and Arabic. The confusion caused by using the Devanagari grapheme > (for /d/) with a dot underneath it to represent the borrowed /z/ (as >) is most likely the cause. People without formal English education frequently experience this.
Many Indians with limited English exposure may also pronounce the sound "f" as the voiceless bilabial plosive "ph." Remember that the loaned / f / from Persian and Arabic is written in Hindi (devanagari) by adding a dot under the grapheme for native [ph]: >. This substitution is less frequent than the one for [z], and in many instances, native Hindi speakers use /f/ instead of /ph/ or combine the two.
• The inability of people from rural backgrounds to articulate specific consonant clusters, particularly word-initial ones. Epenthesis are typically used to address this. • Indian speakers occasionally mix up the /s/ and /z/ sounds, particularly when forming plurals, unlike speakers of other English dialects who use for the pluralization of words ending in voiceless consonants, for words ending in voiced consonants or vowels, and [z] for words ending in sibilants.
• Again, all instances of // are uttered in dialects like Bhojpuri, a trait that is also present in their English. The situation is completely reversed for many Bengalis.
• Native languages like Hindi have comparable affricates for the postalveolar fricatives /t/ and /d/ that are articulated from the palatal area rather than the postalveolar, and this is mirrored in their English.
• When the // sound appears in the middle of a word, many Indian speakers add the [] sound after it while keeping the // sound in the final location. Thus, /rii/ = /rii/ (ringing).
• Syllabic /l/, /m/, and /n/ are typically represented by the VC clusters [l], [m], and [n] (as in button, [bu]), or [il], if a high vowel comes before it (as in tiny, [li]).
VC clusters also use syllable nuclei in words with the spelling er/re (a schwa in RP and an r-coloured schwa in GA). Like Irish English, Indian English employs clearness in all contexts. Other variations, however, use clear in syllable-initial places and dark (velarized-L) in coda and syllabic locations.
No comments: