Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    1·
    6 months ago

    The oddity here is English, not the languages spoken in India. It’s easy to show it by comparing vowel duration in a few languages:

    • Telugu (Dravidian) - short vowels are 70~90ms, long vowels 180~195ms
    • Hindi (Indo-European) - vowels are 100~180ms long
    • Spanish (Indo-European) - vowels are 130~150ms long (NB: I’m analysing the data for native speakers)
    • Japanese (Japonic) - tables IV-V show some data for a short /a/, 70~112ms. I’d expect the long vowels to be thus around 140~220ms, if simply doubling it (Japanese is mostly moraic after all, and open vowels tend to be longer)
    • English (Indo-European) - 85~420ms

    So yes, your typical language spoken in India is spoken faster than English. That doesn’t say much because probably most languages are spoken faster than English.

    Also, keep in mind that “Indian languages” isn’t that useful of a label. It’s a lot like lumping together Basque, Italian, Russian, Hungarian and Maltese as “European languages” - sure, it can be done, but odds are that you won’t get any meaningful conclusion out of it, you know?

    • someguy3@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      6 months ago

      Well I don’t know enough to differentiate “that’s a Sanskrit accent” and “that’s a Hindi accent” etc.

      I think British English put more and longer emphasis on vowels. It’s almost like they speak in vowels only. Compared to Canadian English, Indian accents are still fast.

      • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        6 months ago

        The problem is that Indian languages belong to three or four language families. In contrast, all European languages (except Basque, Hungarian and Finnish) belong to one language family.

        Put another way, Hindi, Sanskrit and English are more similar to each other (all Indo-European) than any of them are to Ladakhi (Sino-Tibetan), Munda (Austroasiatic) or Tamil (Dravidian).

        When an Indian speaks English as a second language, it will be influenced by their first language. But the effect of Punjabi would be quite different from that of Telegu, which in turn would be quite different from that of Zo.