Suprasegmentals

It is still easy to deduce the linguistic background of older InSAfE speakers on the basis of an ‘articulatory setting’ that involves murmur or ‘breathy voice’ for people of North Indian descent and its absence amongst people of South Indian descent (especially Tamil speakers). This difference is slowly being levelled out amongst younger speakers. It is claimed that InSAfE is syllable- rather stress-timed, though this has yet to be researched objectively. Subjectively, the speech rate is deemed fast and the stress patterns fairly different from those of general SAfE. Furthermore sentence rhythm results in shortening of long vowels and even of short vowels.

Although word stress approximates to that of SAfE there are instances of stress being postponed to a medial or final syllable, where SAfE (like RP) has word-initial stress. The InSAfE pattern is, accordingly, closer to that of Hiberno-English (Ó Sé 1986). Furthermore, it is a feature of all informal InSAfE speech. The following representative list of InSAfE words follows the IPA convention that the stress mark precedes the main-stressed syllable: