Which English Accent do I have to follow?

[Prezbucky]

Who decides which accent is most nearly accent-free?

Do we judge vowel pronunciations against Latin or Germanic benchmarks, for instance?

Should the vowels be hard or rounded.

(is O pronounced "oh" or "ehoo"?)
_________________
Billie Jean is not my lover. Hee.

[Jamie (K)]

[Diverhank]

This is an interesting demonstration of a keg stand:

[Sassiek]

Check out this link...might help

[Jamie (K)]

I can say one thing for sure -- the man in that video most DEFINITELY doesn't have a neutral accent, and at times he's hard to understand!

He's also wrong about Indians tending to a neutral accent. They almost never have one, and that's why there's big business in going to India for various companies and training the Indian call center operators to speak intelligibly. Companies move their call centers to India because of the low wages, and surely not for the accent. In fact, one of the complaints about many people at Indian call centers is that they are so hard to understand. Some consumers even lose patience with their speech and hang up.

[Prezbucky]

I know people in my company who try to communicate with Indians daily, and my co-workers complain that the Indian workers are very hard to understand.
_________________
Billie Jean is not my lover. Hee.

[Torsten]

Please activate Javascript in your browser to listen to this audio recording

85 Listened

Download mp3	Click to listen

How to improve our accents?

TOEIC short conversations: Giving directions to the airport

[Jamie (K)]

There are several reasons for native speakers' problems understanding Indians' English. Among them are:

-- Misplaced word stress. For example, you'll notice that in the video linked to above, the speaker says "HOWever", rather than "howEVer". Just one word that is oddly stressed in this way can throw the listener off, and when there are two or three of those mis-stressed words in one sentence, then the native speaker may barely understand at all.

-- Indians frequently have uniform syllable rhythm. A lack of vowel length variation makes Indian speech confusing to native speakers of English, especially when the Indians speak very fast. It's very stressful to listen to them.

-- Replacement of phonemes. Speakers of many Indian languages replace [w] with a soft [v] sound. Many of them replace a vowel before an [r] with [a], so "heard" would sound like "hard", for example. Some of them replace [i] with [ɪ]. Some of them even replace [f] with [p]. You'll notice that the speaker in the video often pronounces a [g] sound where native English speakers would say a [k] sound.

-- Merging of phonemes. A lot of Indians merge [s] and [ʃ] into [s], so, for example, "sheet" sounds like "seat", or like "sit".

-- Indian speakers usually have giant vocabularies, and they tend to use all their words all the time, so the unexpected, excessively formal vocabulary mixed with strange rhythm and pronunciation problems make things even more difficult.

There are a lot of other problems that, when combined make ordinary Indian English very hard to understand. A few Indians, such as the politicians, are very well trained in pronunciation, and those people are easy to understand. However, I've had to ask Indians to repeat sentences as simple as, "Should I turn on the other lights?" as many as four times before I understood them.

You may enjoy these videos:

[Torsten]

Hi Jamie,

So why do you think Indian people have all those problems when they speak English? I mean, what do you think are the reasons Indians don't pronounce words clearly, stress the wrong syllables, etc? Is it because they don't have enough exposure to correct spoken English or are their physical speech organs different from those of native speakers?

TOEFL listening lectures: A university lecture by a professor of Social History

[Jamie (K)]

Their physical speech organs can't be different from those of native speakers. If that were true, then children they have after they immigrate the US or the UK would have the same problem, but obviously their children talk like ordinary native English speakers.

The problem is simply bad pronunciation examples over many years, and no problem being understood by other Indians, so no opportunity to develop good pronunciation habits.

Every human being's speech organs are adequate to pronounce any foreign language correctly.

[Torsten]

Please activate Javascript in your browser to listen to this audio recording

45 Listened

Download mp3	Click to listen

When and where did it all start?

TOEFL listening lectures: A university lecture by a professor of Art History

[Alan]

Hi Torsten,

My comments are those of a layman in the field of phonetics but I believe a speaker of another language speaking English is going to fall back automatically on the rhythms of their own language. This would apply to Indians as much as to any other nationality. A classic example of this can be heard in speeches made in French by the English statesman, Winston Churchill. He always used a declamatory style in his speeches exploiting all the attributes of the English language and made no concessions to the rhythms of French.

Alan
_________________
English as a Second Language
You can read my ESL story Present Simple

[Shyone]