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?

  • someguy3@lemmy.worldOP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    I have a hard time with Indian accents. I think part of it is they stringwordstogether and don’t separate them.

    • tipicaldik@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      8 months ago

      it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

      Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

      • MrsDoyle@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        8 months ago

        Oh that reminded me of one time I was in hospital really sick & an Indian doctor was examining me. She said, “Do you have any wessicles?” Ummm what is that? “Wessicles… I can’t remember the English word…” She tried describing wessicles and it hit me - blisters. “Yes, yes! Blisters!” She had actually been saying vesicles, which to be fair I would have to have looked up if I came across it in a book. We had a good laugh, she diagnosed me correctly, I got the right meds, and I recovered.

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      8 months ago

      Many Indian languages allow words in a logical unit to be stringed together as long as it sounds okay (so basically, avoid consonant - consonant joining).