Pitch accent in Indian‐English teaching discourse

Abstract

The phonetic correlates of accent/stress distinguish Indian English (IE) from American dialects (Spencer, 1957; Kachru, 1983). We examine the realization of accent in IE compared to American English (AE) produced by teaching assistants in similar contexts. In teaching discourse, we find that a lexically accented syllable is often realized in IE with a relative drop in frequency and without a reliable increase in amplitude. In similar contexts, lexically accented syllables in AE reliably increase in both frequency and amplitude. Following the distinction made in Beckman (1986), we conclude that IE acts as a pitch‐accent language rather than as a stress‐accent language like AE. We also suggest a source for the distinct prosodics of IE: some Indian languages use a low pitch on accented syllables (Mohanan, 1986; Hayes and Lahiri, 1991; Harnsberger, 1999). We investigate the effect of different first languages on the production of IE using three Indian teaching assistants with different L1 (Bengali, Tamil, Hindi‐Urdu), and compare their IE discourse to L1 sentences. The similarity of the results for three different L1 suggests that the phonetic correlates of accent in IE are common to Indian languages.