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?

  • Lvxferre
    251·
    9 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?

    • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.worldOP
      52·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • Lvxferre
        6·
        9 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 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.

        • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          9 months ago

          Well British English is soft like many European languages. I remember listening to a video on sounds of different languages and was surprised that British English sounded so similarly soft as other European languages.

      • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        9 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.