Vowels In general, Indian English has fewer peculiarities in its vowel sounds than the consonants, especially as spoken by native speakers of languages like Hindi, the vowel
phoneme system having some similarities with that of English. Among the distinctive features of the vowel-sounds employed by some Indian English speakers: • North Indians, especially a minority of English students and teachers along with some people in various professions like telephone customer service agents, often speak with a
non-rhotic accent. Examples of this include
flower pronounced as ,
never as ,
water as , etc. Some South Indians, such as native Telugu speakers, speak with a rhotic accent, but the final becomes an , and an
alveolar tap is used for /r/, resulting in
water and
never as or and respectively. • Features characteristic of
North American English, such as rhoticity and
r-coloured vowels, have been gaining influence on Indian English in recent years as cultural and economic ties increase between India and the United States. • Many North Indians have an
intonation pattern similar to
Hiberno-English, which perhaps results from a similar pattern used while speaking Hindi.
Splits and mergers • Indian English speakers do not necessarily make a clear distinction between and unlike
Received Pronunciation (RP), i.e. they may have the
cot-caught merger, with the target vowel ranging between either option. • Most Indians have the
trap–bath split of Received Pronunciation, affecting words such as
class,
staff and
last (, and respectively). Though the trap-bath split is prevalent in Indian English, it varies greatly. Many younger Indians who read and listen to
American English do not have this split. Similar to
Australian English, variability is especially present when the split occurs before nasal clusters in words such as
dance,
Francis, and
answer. • Most Indians do not have the
hoarse-horse merger.
Consonants The following are the standard variations in Indian English: • The voiceless
plosives are always unaspirated in Indian English, (aspirated in cultivated form) whereas in RP, General American and most other English accents they are aspirated in word-initial or stressed syllables. Thus "pin" is pronounced in Indian English but in most other dialects. In native Indo-Aryan languages, a predominant language family in India, the distinction between aspirated and unaspirated plosives is phonemic, and the English stops are equated with the unaspirated rather than the aspirated phonemes of the local languages. The same is true of the voiceless postalveolar affricate . The local unvoiced aspirated plosives are instead equated with English fricatives, namely and . • The
alveolar stops English , are often
retroflex , , especially in the north of India. In Indian languages, there are two entirely distinct sets of coronal plosives: one
dental and the other retroflex. Native speakers of Indian languages prefer to pronounce the English alveolar plosives sound as more retroflex than dental, and the use of retroflex consonants is a common feature of Indian English. In the
Devanagari script of Hindi, all alveolar plosives of English are transcribed as their retroflex counterparts. One good reason for this is that unlike most other native Indian languages, Hindi does not have
true retroflex plosives (Tiwari, [1955] 2001). The so-called retroflexes in Hindi are actually articulated as apical
post-alveolar plosives, sometimes even with a tendency to come down to the alveolar region. So a Hindi speaker normally cannot distinguish the difference between their own apical post-alveolar plosives and English's alveolar plosives. Languages such as
Tamil and
Malayalam have
true retroflex plosives, however, wherein the articulation is done with the tongue curved upwards and backwards at the
roof of the mouth. This also causes (in parts of
Uttar Pradesh,
Madhya Pradesh and
Bihar) the preceding alveolar to allophonically change to (, → ). Mostly in north India, some speakers allophonically further change the voiced retroflex plosives to voiced
retroflex flap , and the nasal to a nasalised retroflex flap. Among
Malayalam speakers, the realisation of English /t/ follows systematic rules. Word-initial /t/ is typically realised as retroflex , while in non-initial positions it may be either alveolar or retroflex , depending on word structure. For example, better is pronounced (alveolar), whereas butter is pronounced (retroflex). This is influenced by the fact that Malayalam already contrasts alveolar and retroflex plosives. • Most major native languages of India lack the dental fricatives and (spelled with
th), although [ð] occurs variably as intervocalic allophones in
Gujarati and
Tamil. Usually, the
aspirated voiceless dental plosive is substituted for in the north (it would be unaspirated in the south) and the unaspirated
voiced dental plosive , or possibly the aspirated version , is substituted for . For example, "thin" would be realised as instead of for North Indian speakers, whereas it would be pronounced unaspirated in the south. • The English of
Delhi often has
yod-dropping after coronals, unlike RP. • Indian English is variably rhotic; with pronunciations either being non-rhotic due to the traditional influence of RP, or generally rhotic due to the underlying
phonotactics of the native
Indo-Aryan and
Dravidian languages. • In recent years, rhoticity has been increasing. Generally,
American English is seen as having a large influence on the English language in India recently. The following are variations in Indian English due to
language contact with Indian languages: • Most Indian languages (except
Assamese,
Kashmiri,
Marathi,
Tamil and
Urdu; and conscious pronunciation by
Hindi,
Punjabi,
Dogri, etc. speakers) lack the
voiced alveolar fricative . A significant portion of Indians thus, even though their native languages do have its nearest equivalent: the unvoiced , often use the voiced palatal affricate (or postalveolar) . This makes words such as and sound as and (the latter, especially in the North). This replacement is equally true for
Persian and
Arabic loanwords into Hindi. The probable reason is the confusion created by the use of the Devanagari grapheme (for ) with the
Nuqta to represent (as ). A similar thing happens in other Indian languages like
Bengali, with the letters for (except Indian varieties of
Nepali and
Marathi where represents //) usually being used to represent . This is common among people without formal English education. In
Telugu (plus even in
Hindi and
Punjabi to some extent) and are allophones in some cases, so the words such as
fridge become . • In
Assamese, and are pronounced as ; and and are pronounced as . Retroflex and dental consonants are not present and only alveolar consonants are used unlike other Indian languages. Similar to
Bengali and
Odia, is pronounced as and in
Assamese. For example; change is pronounced as , vote is pronounced as and English is pronounced as . • Again, in
Awadhi,
Bhojpuri,
Chhattisgarhi,
Kannauji and
Odia, all instances of are spoken like (and in
Assamese), a phenomenon that is also apparent in their English. Exactly the opposite is seen for many
Bengalis. Further, in some Indian languages, stress is associated with a low pitch, whereas in most English dialects, stressed syllables are generally pronounced with a higher pitch. Thus, when some Indian speakers speak, they appear to put the stress accents at the wrong syllables, or accentuate all the syllables of a long English word. Certain Indian accents possess a "sing-song" quality, a feature seen in a few English dialects of Britain, such as
Scouse and
Welsh English. ==Numbering system==