India 1

Listen to India 1, a 20-year-old woman from Lucknow and New Delhi, India. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 20

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1979

PLACE OF BIRTH: Lucknow, India

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: N/A

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: Subject was attending university at the time of this interview.

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

Subject lived in Hyderabad and New Delhi, and was attending American University in Cairo at the time of this recording.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Her English is very educated, fluent and British in influence, and she speaks of the many Indian accents that can be heard in India, complaining of the stereotypical Indian accent imitated in the West.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Krista Scott

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 1999

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I initially lived in Lucknow, which is in India, then moved on to Hyderabad, again in India, and then back to New Delhi, where I lived for the past five years.  Studying in the American University, I often come across people mocking about the Indian accent.  They often start by saying, uh, “What is your name?”  “How are you doing?” but, which is actually not the typical Indian accent, only because we have different languages and accents.  We have a number of languages because of which the accent, the dialect differs.  That’s why even the, even in English you get to see people who, who speak in various accents.  So maybe this is what it is funny about, but I think Indian accent is different in itself, it is various, it’s varied in India itself.  You often get to not understand people in India who speak English.  But, uh, this is the way it is.  Indian accent is not just one what I spoke.  It is, it is a blend of various other accents, I should say.  There’s this Indian festival called Holi and, uh, the special thing about this festival is that you’re, eh, it, it starts, the festival starts in the morning, and all you have to do in the festival is color the person in front of you.  It depends on … see, you … eh … Holi is a festival of colors in which we, we play with colors, we color the people around us, and throughout the morning we just keep either throwing water at people or coloring them and, uh, the best experience I’ve had is in Cairo where we got to color each other and when we started walking on roads people were terribly astonished as to what happened to these people.  I mean they, they were, sometime they were expressionless.  They didn’t know what to say after having looked at us, multicolored faces, walking on the streets and it was really, I mean it was embarrassing for us.  We thought, it’s a typical Indian custom with peo-, which people would enjoy outside, but we really got really funny and expressionless faces to see.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Pete Cross

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 14/07/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The subject, whose English is very educated and fluent and British in influence, speaks of the many Indian accents that can be heard in India, complaining of the stereotypical Indian accent imitated in the West. However, the subject strongly exemplifies the lack of aspiration on initial [p], [t] and [k]. She also speaks of the celebration by the Indian community in Cairo of the Festival of Colours.

COMMENTARY BY: Krista Scott

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 1999

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.
• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.