The Indian Accent

The Indian accent as we know is mostly made fun of. You might have seen it in the popular sitcom ‘The Big Bang Theory’, how at many times Howard imitates Rajesh’s ‘Indian’ accent.  But we Indians can’t do anything about it. Here's why.

The Indian accent as we know is mostly made fun of. You might have seen it in the popular sitcom ‘The Big Bang Theory’, how at many times Howard imitates Rajesh’s ‘Indian’ accent. You can also see it in the video above or you can click on this link https://youtu.be/Jfs1HTELWbM. Funny, isn't it! But we Indians can’t do anything about it. It’s how we were taught to speak. 

If you take a close look at most of the Indian native languages like Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Odia etc, you will find that every one of them is spoken by pronouncing the individual letters which come with certain symbols that guides us how to pronounce a certain word.

To make it easier for you, let’s take an example of probably the most popular Indian name, ‘Raj’. I know you pronounced it the way you do as 'Raaj'. But now read the letters separately, you get ‘R’, ‘a’ and ‘j’, which after two or three times will sound like ‘Aarayjay’. Now try that with the names in the English language. Let’s say ‘John’. The letters are ‘J’, ‘o’, ‘h’ and ‘n’. After saying the letters at least a few times, you will see it sounds like ‘Jayoeichen’. Let’s try another one.  How about ‘Sam’! So the letters are ‘S’, ‘a’ and ‘m’. And it sounds, ‘Essayem’. You can surely give it a try with other names or words. 

After all that being said you are probably wondering, what does this has to do with the way Indians speak English! You can argue that Indians don’t speak English like that but it does sound different. Well it’s because they give stress on every letter of the word. For example, if you listen to them closely you will find that they give stress on the words which have the letter ‘T’ in them. You are probably thinking about it right now in your head. Well, ‘T’ is not the only letter we give stress on there are other letters too, like ‘D’, ‘H’, etc. If you have an Indian friend, colleague or neighbor, you can surely hang out with them and observe this yourself.

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