Indian English, What is Different and Why?

Hello Everyone,

In today's Yash's-Lame-Excuses-For-Not-Publishing, we have:

1. School Work
2. School Exams
3. College Applications

And therefore, we must forgive Yash for not publishing for more than a month. Also, it's his birthday today, so we could probably cut him some slack.

So today's post is going to be about the way Indian English pronunciation differs from most of the other accents of English. What I have put here is just two of these differences and the reason I have chosen these two differences is because I have some theories to explain why Indian English is different in these places. Some of these theories make sense, some of them are not quite scientific, but just products of my imagination. Have a look and let me know what you think. 

*I have decided to include a pronunciation guide for this post because I am not using the standardized IPA to describe sounds since most laymen would not be familiar with it. I have tried to use an intuitive system for transcribing the sounds, with most English letters representing the sounds they usually stand for. For vowels, I have used ":" following the vowel to indicate that the vowel is long. "kh", "ph" and "th" - when used to describe pronunciations- are "k", "p" and "t" pronounced with a puff of air. 

To aspire or not to aspire: Let me tell you a thing about aspirated consonants. They are the ones you pronounce with a puff of air.  Speakers of Indian languages may be familiar with these sounds as the ones in 'phal', 'khaanaa' and 'thaa'. Non-Indian English Speakers may know these sounds which occur when 'p', 't' and 'k' begin a word. For example, in most accents of English other than Indian English, 'pig' is pronounced 'phig' ('ph' does NOT sound like 'f'), 'cat' sounds like 'khat' and 'tea' sounds like 'thee' ('th' does NOT sound like the 'th' in 'thin' or 'this'). And that is where Indian English differs from other Englishes. In most accents of English, voiceless stops (p, t, k) at the start of the word are aspirated. But in Indian English, it's not. And now, for the more interesting part: why?

I think this happens because Indian languages make a distinction between the unaspirated and aspirated ('k' and 'kh' for example) whereas in English, these are considered allophones. This means that these can be considered variations of the same sound, which occur in different places in a word. Thus, I like to imagine that one needs to point out to us Indians where to pronounce the consonant with aspiration and where not and since English fails to do that, we pronounce all of them without aspiration. ('th' in thin, thing etc. is not an aspirated stop in non-Indian accents of English, for those wondering; I will do a post on ‘th’ after some time maybe)

One vowel or two: Most of English long vowels are actually not long vowels but what is called diphthongs i.e. two vowels combined together. So for example, long 'i' is roughly pronounced 'a:i' as it 'bite', 'I' and 'mine'. These vowels used to be genuine, long, monophthongs (one vowel) very long back, but they have evolved into diphthongs in Modern English. Except, all of these except long 'i' and 'u' are realized as monophthongs in Indian English. For example, long 'a' in 'gate' is realized as roughly 'ei' ('geit') in most varieties of English, but we Indians go with a long 'e:' (ge:t). Similarly, long 'o' is 'au' or 'ou' (I have generally seen British people go with 'au' and Americans go with 'ou' but since Britain and America have such a huge diversity of accents within them as well, I don't want to generalize) usually, but for us, it is 'o:'. But why does this happen?
I have a theory for this. It is not an actual proved theory, but something I like to believe in. I think Indians love to monophthong-ize i.e. every time there's a diphthong, we find a way to make it a monophthong. That is what we have done with a lot of our own languages. For example, the most ancient form of Sanskrit had four diphthongs: 'ai', 'a:i', 'au' and 'a:u'. After some time, 'ai' and 'au' came to be pronounced as 'e:' and 'o:', whereas 'a:i' and 'a:u' remained diphthongs but downgraded to 'ai' and 'au'. Thus, from four, we came down to two diphthongs. Later, when Sanskrit evolved into various Prakrits, these two remaining diphthongs also became 'e' and 'o'.
And in some modern Indian languages, such as Hindi, a lot of younger people, in a lot of places pronounce the remaining 'ai' and 'au' are pronounced as 'a' in 'bat' and 'o' in 'cot' respectively. And therefore, my conjecture: Indians monophthong-ize. And which is why we monophthong-ize English diphthongs.

I know this is not a very long post but the reason for that is because this is all I have to write about this topic, and since I am really fascinated by this topic, I could not fail to write a post about it. Hope you liked it. 

Yash