Distinctive sounds of Indian English

The distinctive sounds of Indian English have been identified by Bansal (1978: 101-111) and Nihalani, Tongue and Hosali (1979: 209-212) by viewing IndE as a uniform variety of an educated group. However, much regional variation is found in the utterance of many vowels and consonants across the length and breadth of the country. The variations are mainly due to the following factors:

(i) The influence of the phonology of Indian languages which consist of over 200 mainstream languages belonging to four distinct language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman.

(ii) Within the languages of the respective language families there is much regional variation.

(iii) Since English is taught to Indians by Indians the local influence of sounds can be easily perceived.

(iv) Sociologically, the IndE speech community consists broadly of three kinds of speakers: (a) a small number of people whose command over English is near-native, (b) a significant number of administrators, teachers, scientists, journalists, businessmen etc., at the middle level, whose variety is considered to be the educated variety and a benchmark for English Language teaching (ELT) and (c) at the lower level there are many others whose competence is severely limited and who can use English only in their restricted domains, e.g. shopkeepers, waiters etc.