Indian English Accent

Introduction
What is the Indian English accent?
the term “Indian English” refers to the type of English
spoken in India.
„Indian English Accent“ is the group of English dialects
spoken primarily in the Indian subcontinent.
„Indian accents“ vary greatly. Some Indians speak English
with an accent very close to a standard British accent,
others lean toward a more „vernacular“, native-tinted
accent for their English speech.
Historical background of Indian English

Early 1600‘s 1765 Early 1800‘s 1835

English was The process of

East India Company
established firmly as A large number of producing English-
started trading and
the medium of Christian school knowing bilinguals in
English missionaries
instruction and imparting an English India which officially
first began their
administration by the education endorsed T. B.
efforts
British Raj Macaulay
The population using English in India

Hindi is the main language in India, but English is widely used

in the media, Higher Education and government and therefore
remains a common means of communication, both among the
ruling classes and between speakers of mutually unintelligible
languages.
The Indian English has its own accent of vowels and
consonants pronunciation. And we will discuss both Indian
vowels and consonants in the following slides.
Languages Number of speakers
Hindi 422,048,642
Bengali 83,369,769
Gujarati 46,091,617
Tamil 60,793,814
Urdu 51,536,111
English 336,449
The population using English in India

As an additional language, English has 223,000,000 second

language speakers and 8,773,000 third language speakers.
The total English apeakers in India is 232,000,000 which means
the English speaker is 23,18% from the total population.

Total population
English speakers
Indian Consonants
Some aspects of Indian Accented English and British English
are similar in comparison to American English.
Such as dropping of vocalic “r” sounds (as the “r” at the end
of the words “for” and “car”) and the pronunciation of a clear
“t” sound in words like “butter”
Many Indian English speakers don‘t make a clear distinction
between /θ/ and /t/.
(e.g. tend to stop the air for the “th” sounds (“thigh”, “then”),
making the “th” sound like a “t” or a “d.)
The “v” and “w” sounds are often used interchangeably, so
“vine” may sound like “wine” and vice versa.

There is also no release of air when /p/ precedes a vowel in

words like „pin“ and „pot“ („what happened“, „my parents“)
Indian Vowels
In general, Indian English has fewer peculiarities in its vowel
sounds than the consonants and that is some distinctive
features of the vowel sounds employed by some Indian English
speakers.
 The Indian „D“ Accent
In Indian accent, the „d“ sound id pronounced with the tongue too far
back in the mouth.

Indians tend to replace the „TH“ sound with just a „T“ or „D“

For example: DE vs. THE, TING vs. THING, DAT vs. THAT

This creates heavier sound than the American English „D“ sound.

This accent resulted from the mixing between the pronunciation of

English letters with its counterparts in the Indian Native Letters.
Thank you!