Why Indian English Accent Sound So Funny

• 42.5% questionnaire participants attribute their reaction towards India accent to “non-standard pronunciation”,
• They do not discriminate between aspirated and unaspirated consonants or It just…sounds different, it’s really hard for me to follow.

Four Dimensions

Pronunciation

In there anything unique with Indian accent pronunciation that drives people to laugh? No!

Indian Accent is funny because it's different? No!

Match-guise test

• Participant A has little acquaintance of Indian English Speech, and seldom surfs the Internet. The other as a contract has watched TV shows concerning Indian English and has a relatively higher English proficiency.
• In the first test episode, they are asked to compare the vocal sample of an Indian English speech to an American one.
• Rate different English accents on a scale

The result of scale in questionnaires for Chinese, 1 means not funny at all and 5 means very funny

Methodology

It suggests that when people say Indian English is “funny”, they are actually referring to the speaker, whether he/she is a persona or an obscure image in their mind.

“I think of raj each time when I hear Indian accent.”

What makes people laugh?

National Image

• Take the paradigm of Ethnography
• quantitative and qualitative analysis are combined
• Interview details

Assumptions

1. A questionnaire survey on Tsinghua students:the questionnaire looks into informants’ knowledge on Indian the country, culture and people. The scale question looks into how “funny” different language varieties are to the informants and last essay question serves as a self-evaluation on their language attitude.

2. A detailed interview on six informants.

3. A matched-guise test on two persons.

• It is community-wide stereotyped impression on India and the “virtual speaker” image rather that Indian English pronunciation that influence people’s attitude towards Indian English accent.
• Mass media plays a vital role in directing such stereotypes.

both Chinese and foreign informants’ impressions on India are limited and quite consistent.

Mass Media

Chinese attitudes towards India are highly influenced by media, especially the Internet.

• Comedies prevail in their total knowledge about India
• Knowledge resources do affect informants’ attitude

• I don’t find it interesting. The characters that use Indian accents usually play the same type of roles all the time no matter what the TV or movie is. This gives us an inaccurate one-dimensional view of Indian people.

• In the ‘new media,’ such as blogs, social networks and video-sharing sites such as YouTube, one is exposed on a daily basis to facts, opinions and the mixture of the two

Introduction

Literature Review

"it’s vally vally diffigo to dog to demn"

Phonology

Few researches available have been done on people’s reaction towards Indian Accent. But there are many literatures on language attitude research.

“Indian English” usually indicates a variety of English used widely in spoken and written contexts in India

LANGUAGE ATTITUDE?

This paper looks into people’s attitudes towards Indian culture, examines the main ways (for example, movies and TV series) through which we learn about India, in addition to the phonology study of Indian spoken English.

practically everybody agrees that attitudes are learned from previous experience and that they are not momentary but relatively ‘enduring.’

Psychological

mechanism

Works Cited

distinguished features

• Agheyisi, Rebecca and Fishman, Joshua A., Language Attitude Studies: A Brief Survey of Methodological Approaches, Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 12, No. 5 (May, 1970) , pp. 137-157, Published by: The Trustees of Indiana University on behalf of Anthropological Linguistics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029244
• Baker, Colin. (1992). Attitudes and Language. Multilingual Matters Press
• Anderson, Benedict R., Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, Cornell University Press,1987
• Robert SW, James EC. A Theory of Humor Elicitation. Psychological Review, 1992, 99(4):663-688
• Keval J. Kumar, International Communication, Advertising and India’s ‘National’ Image (Report on The Sixth Asian Media Forum), 2008

Difficult

talk to me, talk to me

1. Syllable-based VS Stress-based

2. Voiceless plosives /p/ /t/ /k/ are often unaspirated in Indian English. For example, the word “talk” [tɔːk] is pronounced as [tʰ ɔːk].

3. Instead of pronouncing /r/ as flap, many Indian English speakers are used to pronounce it as a trill or roll. Such retroflex articulatory setting influences all the phonemes, especially /t/ /d/ /s/ /z/ /l/ /r/ n/.

4. Vocabulary

Charpoy & Mamaji

NOTICE

Pay attention that when we refer to “standard English” or “non-standard” in this paper, it takes stance of informants and uses British or General American as a measurement.

Under a sociolinguistic perspective, Indian English is like all the other varieties of English and “inferiority” or “superiority” are not involved.

“I have bad English pronunciation, and, lol, they [Indian English speakers] are even worse than me.

Well, they speak very fast…different, but they are native speakers.

Conclusion

Appreciate the differences

Be open-minded to all cultures

Suggestions for us all

Suggestions for Further Study

1. More participants and interviewees can be involved.The variables of gender, age and ethnicity is not controlled during the data gathering, partly because the study is limited in size, partly because Indian English is an “foreign language” to all participants—gender or generation identity are rarely involved.

2. A more intensive research into how we misinterpret Indian culture and how did it begin can be carried out. We may look deeper into each media and information resource.

Why Does Indian English Accent Sound Funny

Fan Xiaoxiao

Tsinghua University