Uncleji, we are going to sabzi mandi.

Beta, even I am going to the sabzi mandi only!

If you can get the evens and onlys down with the regional intonation, even if you don’t speak a word of Hindi in these parts, the people with “get” what you are saying – only.

It is not physiology that distinguishes one accent from another. It’s not even the phonetic realizations of phonemes, because pronouncing individual phones correctly doesn’t make one sound like AmE accent. It is something more: voice quality (placement of voice, resonance, etc); intonation; stress. Many accent reduction coaches focus on ‘citation’ form speaking, which is useless. If you really wanna cultivate how to mimic others, cultivate an ability to humm how Indians sound or russians sound when they speak–humming is one of many pedagogic devices used to train singing.

Whenever one utters a single phone, it is uttered with a particular pitch; many books on accents focus less on pitch, but more on phonemes. This is the reason majority of discussions focus too much on phonemes ( v/w/labio dental fricative v; fricative th/dental stop th; etc). On this board, people agree that there is more to accents than the business of phonemes. It is the placement of voice: an imaginary point of where to resonate vowels. This requires placing ones vocal instrument in one particular way, call it American way: tongue (which plays a role in the production of vowels); soft palate (this plays role in pharyngeal resonance).

One more quality to Indian accent: the way they stress words. This is has to do with: their syllabifying English words according to their native language, thereby messing up the whole structure.

For instance, one commenter posted an example: “GRA-choo-ity” for “graTUity.

Majority of words that end with ‘y’ usually get ante-penult stress (third to the end): gra-’tu-i-ty or gra-TU-i-ty (t in the onset position doesn’t get affrication, but it does get affricated in the coda place, for example, in con-,grat-u-’la-tion.) Second, there is a gemination of /w/, because of /u/. Vowel a becomes schwa, when that syallable doesn’t have a coda consonant; but it becomes a CAT vowel when it it got a coda consonant (for instance observe the first vowel a sound in fan-’tas-tic, even though it is not stressed).

They are so many heuristics that are internalized among native speakers; these are not taught, nor do they play any rule in Indian English.

Besides the different accents, Indians from every region have an execess of, or a lack of certain sounds in their pronuncition. One of my tasks is help them aquire these sounds at acceptable levels

One of my friends would pronounce cheese as cheech. Why? So the listener doesn’t get confused between Cheez (which means thing in Hindi) and Cheese. Who can argue with that logic?

what do you mean by ‘voice quality’? Pitch? Timbre? Tone? I was actually under the impression that ABDs might have a leg up on everyone else, when it comes to imitating stereotypical DBD accents because of all the time they spent with a parent(s) that may have spoken accented english of the kind they wish to emulate in performance.

I think that without some sort of environmental/nurture-based factor, being able to do an ‘authentic’ accent is not magically the province of ABDs. It is also possible to switch–I can do hick, conversational, non slangified queen’s english for the SL dinner party and many others.

At the risk of being non-PC, simple empirical observations indicate otherwise to me. Its not about accent, its about voice quality.

The answer is no…we all (humans) have the same physiology…accent is a result of environment and surroundings.

Is there actually any data on this?

May be I am old school but I don’t ever think of my parents’ accents worthy of mocking.

blockquote>The pity is that the mocking comes from people who dont realize how hard it is to learn a new accent once you are an adult.

We are not mocking anyone. We are just sharing stories of how our parents accents affected us and for the DBDs that have posted, their own issues with accents and pronunciation. Earlier I commented on how my GujArati is not that great. I know first hand how hard it is to learn an accent as an adult.

The pity is that the mocking comes from people who dont realize how hard it is to learn a new accent once you are an adult.

Only way to prove or disprove it is by checking the accents of Desi kids were adopted by non desi families. I remember there was a post about a few minnestoa raised kids who were from Bengal. Would they have a Desi flavour?

It is only after coming to Australia that I can distinguish between various ancestries. Aussies of Italian/ Lebanese / Vietnamese / Chinese and Irish backgrounds sound different. Even when they switch to the aussie ocker, the flavours remain. One can pick this over the phone rather easily. American accented English as spoken in the Godfather is very similar to the Australian accented English as spoken by persons of a Italian heritage. Currently, we have heaps of American consultants on assignment and when it is pointed out that they have an accent and hence need to talk slowly, it does not go down too well