Week 8, Part 1: South Asian Languages & Pronunciation

In the Indian subcontinent, there are 16 major languages and hundreds of dialects spoken. Four languages of South India, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu, are members of the Dravidian family, while all others are part of the Indo-Aryan family. Interestingly enough, if a BASIS family speaks more than one Indian language, the languages spoken are likely Hindi and at least one of the Dravidian languages, maybe indicating that many people come from the South. The Indo-Aryan family is part of the bigger branch of Indo-European languages, which derives from Sanskrit and extends to Pakistan (Urdu), Bangladesh (Bengali), Nepal (Nepali), Sri Lanka (Sinhala), and the Maldives (Divehi).

Because of the long period of British rule in South Asian history, one should not be surprised to find English as a core part of education there. As a result, most problems encountered by South Asians are effects of educational background rather than a particular language background, hence the generalization of South Asian languages in this project.

To start, English has 22 distinct vowel sounds (although five vowel letters) and 24 consonant phonemes. On the other hand, most South Asian languages have around 10 vowel phonemes and over 30 consonants. Common features of the accent as a result of the differences in phonemes are:

• Loss of distinction between some vowel sounds due to lack of distinction in mother tongues

• Emphasis on /t/ and /d/ sounds when speaking English

• Difficulty distinguishing between /v/ and /w/ in English because there is only one phoneme for phonemes similar to /v/ and /w/

• Difficulty pronouncing /ʒ/ (pleasure) due to lack of phoneme in mother tongues

Additionally, South Asian languages are largely phonetically spell, so everything written is exactly how it's pronounced. On the other hand, it is discovered early in elementary school by English speakers that English is definitely not the same. I've been annoyed about been vs. bean since first grade and I remember when I first learned about their spellings. As a result, many beginner South Asian ELLs read English words exactly as they are spelled out of habit. For example, plural words with an s at the end may be pronounced with an /s/ instead of /z/.

Like for Chinese ELLs previously mentioned in Week 3, Part 2, English consonant clusters pose difficulty for South Asian ELLs due to the rarity of clusters in South Asian languages. Common features of the accent as a result are:

• Clusters with /s/ may come after an additional /ɪ/ sound (stop vs. istop)

• As with Chinese accents, clusters may be split by a vowel sound (slow vs. salow)

The South Asian accent is also characterized by different intonation. South Asian languages are generally syllable-timed, while stress plays a factor but is secondary to rhythm (arrangement of long and short syllables). On the other hand, English is stress-timed, and as a result is unpredictable and the only way to truly "learn" is by exposing oneself to the language and being aware of the stresses. As someone who has been learning French for 6 years, I started out trying to pay attention to stresses and tones, but eventually gave up and realized that my American accent is going to stay forever unless I go to a speech specialist or someone whose job is to change my accent.

I tried looking for a visual about South Asian accents, but to avoid offending anyone, here is a comic about accents with a cat instead: