Periodically, we see stories about how folks in India involved in the global economy are taking accent classes to work on their English accents. Thomas Friedman wrote about the accent training many call-center workers undergo in The World is Flat. And today there was a typically fluffy piece in The Times of India about people who work on “regional” accent-training within India.
But it seems to me there hasn’t been enough coverage of accent problems that go the other way around. Watching Aliens in America the other night, it occurred to me that ABD actors and comedians who play immigrants in comic roles in Hollywood sometimes need their own accent training. You wouldn’t expect it, but most ABDs can’t really do a perfect Indian English accent. It’s either overdone (too musical), or inconsistent (those American ‘D’ and ‘T’ sounds creep in at telltale moments, as do those flat American ‘A’ and ‘E’ sounds) — or both. Adhir Kalyan doesn’t have many obvious flaws, though in my view something isn’t quite right with his accent (check it out at 1:45-2:00 in this clip). Kal Penn’s “Taj Mahal Badalandabad” character in Van Wilder has an accent that I find more convincing (see this clip), and it becomes funny when he says things that are particularly obscene or outrageous (as he does in that somewhat NSFW clip). And Russel Peters is quite good — accents are his particular strength. But there’s a host of lesser-known actors and stand-up comedians in parentally-financed movies like American Desi (and its various clones and imitations), who sound like they learned their Indian accents from Apu on The Simpsons, rather than real Indians.
Somehow Brit-Asian actors don’t seem to have this problem. The accents on Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42 always sound perfect to me. Why is that?
At any rate, I’m hereby calling for an accent-accentuation school for aspiring ABD actors and comedians trying to get a break in Hollywood. The staff, incidentally, will be entirely composed of Indian call center workers fired because their accents were too thick (or indeed, too regional). Classes will be held exclusively via videoconference (the instructors, of course, will all be based in India).
Short Circuit, The Simpsons, and Indiana Jones. Those 3 put together f-cked up my childhood.
“It really annoys me when my little cousins make fun of me when I’m trying to speak Gujurati”
When I called home from uni I used to go from English to gujju,
@40: Bess,
I am also a mailman in real life(the electronic kind)!! and I am full of useless trivia!
Chachaji, we aren’t laughing at anyone, we are laughing together. For me and all my ADB friends, these stories are just another thread that ties us together.
this thread is bringing back so many memories. when i was a kid, i saw my cousin in india for the first time. we were both about 7. we were playing some game involving the alphabet. there was a disagreement on whether “zed” or “zee” was correct. someone had to die.
@42:
Dude…..that is the wrong attitude!
OMG, LMAO! My cousins do that all the time. My masi yells at them if they throw in too many english words when they are speaking to her.
I do believe that fluency, written and spoken, in mother tongues is diminishing greatly in the large cities in India. Especially in places like Bombay where kids go to english medium schools, speak english and maybe hinglish with their friends and maybe speak their mother tongue at home with the family. None of my bombay cousins can read or write Guju even though they speak it fluently. But they are constantly throwing in english words. When challenged to speak all Gujurati and not say a single english word for 5 minutes, my cousin couldn’t do it!
I noticed Punjabis tend to have a very thick accent. South Indians tend to have a nasal accent and more of a tendency to mix v and w. Then you have the famous Malayalee “simbalee” for simply.
That is correct.
Even though my middle-school English teacher in India taught me (us) the difference in pronunciation (her example was “Rip Van Winkle”), I never really picked up on it till I landed in the US and my cousin indirectly made fun of it while we were out at a restaurant. Of course, he didn’t tell me how to correct it, but that event triggered the memory back to Mrs. Verma’s class, and a bulb lit up. 🙂
BIG, your comment reminded me of a quote from Happiness. 🙂 🙂
Helen Jordan: I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you. Joy Jordan: But I’m not laughing.
(not implying that you meant it that way)
Isn’t Adhir Kalyan South African (not ABD)?
Isn’t Adhir Kalyan South African (not ABD)?
Yes — and I didn’t know that before. Anyway, perhaps that explains why his accent seemed a little off to me. (I still don’t think it’s a convincing “just arrived” Indo/Pak accent)
British Asians are the nobility among the Indian diaspora. The end.
V and W can be fixed. However pronouncing the ‘the’, ‘thank you’ is a difficult sound to master. I dont believe any Indian languages have the ‘th’ sound.
58 –
…..
Skipinder the Punjabi Kangaroo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=wW96Z9AJf38
THANK YOU.
Agreed.
I used to drive my mama (maternal uncle) crazy with this…I’d keep challenging him to say ‘think’ or ‘thought’ in the SAME WAY that I said it, and he just couldn’t.
Speaking of “th”.. I just can’t get over the way some girls in LA say “teinks”…
Why does Kashmir become Kashmere in Amreekanese? Likewise Samir becomes Samere.
We Amreekans insist on pronouncing every ‘R’ we encounter, except for people from Boston, who don’t have this particular linguistic hang-up.
This pronounced R ‘colors’ the vowel directly before it, changing what it sounds like. the ‘ee+r’ sound in English (near, fear) is not a pure ‘ee’ sound because of that R. It’s ee + schwa + R (Indian accents use ee + schwa for these same words as well, but drop the R).
So Samir because Samee-ur … the pure ‘ee’ + r is a very foreign sound to American ears.
As far as V/W, the same letter is used in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi and a few other Indian languages for both sounds. Sometimes it is closer to v, sometimes closer to w in regular speech in the mother tongue. Try explaining the difference between the two ‘d’ sounds in Hindi to a typical monolingual American and see how far you get – it is the same thing, but reversed.
“@16: Puli,
the same conversation i used to have with my mom in the first grade.”
some of the greatest moments i’ve had with my dad are trying to get him to say the word “voodoo.” funniest times of my life!!! every now and then, during some serious moment, we’ll look at each other and say “voodoo” and we’ll dissolve into hysterics.
My pre schooler figured out this accent thing recently. She would ask for water, pronounced in the American english way and then close up her mouth and say “woter” trying to sound more like me , I guess. I think she felt I would only understand if she said it the way I do…we still cant stop laughing when she does that:-)
Wait, what do you two mean by “the th sound”? If you mean an unaspirated “th” like the one pronounced in “theta”, then shouldn’t the Devanagari त suffice? Or the Tamil த? Amitabh, was your uncle aspirating it like in “थ”? I ask because I know a lot of people who aspirate the “th” in “third floor” because they’re used to transliterating थ as “th” and therefore pronounce “th” as “थ”. (As a fine point of interest, the Tamil த substitutes for the voiceless त and the voiced द, and because Tamil does not have aspirated sounds, it is also used for थ and ध, all of which basically means that if you transliterate Devanagari-based languages into Tamil, forget about a faithful transliteration).
again! perpetuating the myth of the aspirational model minority!
Aspirating, not aspiring! If you persist with bad humor, I shall eventually become heggs (eggs-aspirated).
@Pravin RE: #32 You hit on something really important. Sometimes word choice completely ruins (or makes) an accent or a bad ABD comedy routine. I put it in the same category as the awful costume choices which I only hope are forced on Indian actors by utterly confused directors.
another example of the “th” sound in an indian language is the “thatha” in gurmukhi/punjabi
Ok, I certainly got schooled on the ‘th’ sound. Let me qualify my earlier statement: Hindi/Urdu dont have the ‘the’ sound.
Ok, I certainly got schooled on the ‘th’ sound. Let me qualify my earlier statement: Hindi/Urdu dont have the ‘the’ sound.
yeah, careful on generalizing about indian languages. too many people generalize from their own cultural background. e.g., i didn’t know that punjabi had tones, manish didn’t know that bengali didn’t have gender.
he he. but i was wondering the same thing as pingpong – esp. since the ‘th’ can have two different sounds – one sounding more like ‘th’ as in ‘thank you,’ but one sounding more like ‘dh’ as in ‘this.’ either way, don’t most desi languages have this – be they sanskrit based or otherwise? but, yes, if it was the aspirated sound that amitabh met – and i’ve heard plenty of desis use it in saying words like ‘thanks.’
perhaps when speaking english, because so many of the less heavy desi accents have british influences. however, i have found that many brit-asian actors retain a heavy british accent when speaking in a desi language.
ACfD – to which sound are you referring – ‘th’ as in ‘the’ – because wouldn’t that just be a ‘dh’ as in ‘hindi’ or ‘urdu’?
I thought ‘thappad’ is Hindi and has the ‘th’ sound in it?
do not cast aspir-sions on my yoomor.
the oxford catalog of stereotypes 0f 2007 says that this is because all bengalis are effete.
Yup, “Hindi” rhymes with “in thee”. In fact I’ve seen the word “The” transliterated as “दि”. As in “दि sword of Tipu Sultan” (too lazy to transliterate the rest of it).
See I always associated the Perfect Indian English Accent, or should I say, ACCINT ;p with that chip-on-the-shoulder, BBC-esque, speak-it-better-than-those-bastards-who-taught-us, upper crust Indian accent.
The ones that parents are always trotting out to kids growing up elswhere and acquiring other twangs to their voices (for me, it’s the not-so-subtle fush-end-chups Kiwi accent)…
It’s all ‘Fawh goodness sake, pleeze pronounce your words cleeeeearly. Hwhot kind of accint is that?’ snootiness.
*Although in saying that it was just yesterday that I got my v’s and w’s mixed up in a v nostalgic moment 😉 Hehe gota lowe those times, 12 years after mowing avay.
in school, i used to play this game with my frds. not a single one could go beyong 2 min…also i get corrected abt my accent in all three languages…hindi, marathi and english. once i was also told to prononuce my surname in a more marathi tone…still dont get it right 🙁
I used to know a brother and sister (dbds who emigrated at a very young age–single digits) who spoke completely unaccented Texan, except with their parents. Very strange. And the last word of every sentence had an “-uh” appended to its end(uh).
I used to think I did a great pan-Indian accent. Then I started hearing Ponniah Manikavasagam pronounce “US” as “yooyes” on Free Speech Radio News and realized that no such thing as a Pan-Indian accent exists. (Incidentally, PC Dubey’s way of ending every sentence on an upturn (on the same show) never ceases to crack me up.)
Speakin of desi actors….just caught Kal Penn on House, minus any lame accent though
I’ve met a few South African desis, and I don’t really know how to describe their accents. They sounded slightly British and used more British vocab, but it was definitely something different. They didn’t sound “Indian” either. They said the white South Africans of British descent sound… British.
Wonder if Indians in South Africa speak with a British accent.
I got a few friends from RSA both white and desi, they have regional accents. The white cape town accent sounds very posh, almost like someone from a British Public school like Eton. Jo’Berg white accent sounds entirely different almost mixed with afrikans. Plus the whites in south africa come from different backgrounds some are british and dutch but you also have many who migrated from other former colonies like Germans from Namibia and Portuguese from Angola.
Same with desi south african is hardly British, sounds more like african.
They also use funny words like a “Robot” for Traffic Lights. The first time my friend used it I din’t get what she was saying. Stop before the robot, I was like looking where, i dont see any.
I am a dbd..my fake american accent is preety decent..although some of you may disagree…but the hardest word I had to master was utility.
for months I kept saying U-Ti-Lity (Mu-ni-ci-pal-ity, etc) when I was talking without thinking. Finally U-Tility comes natually to me like elevator.
Yes, exactly. Which is different than the American way of saying ‘th’ in words like thanks or thinks or thorough.
On a different note…I know at least two people who were not ‘good’ in ANY language…one was a family acquaintance of Marwari background who grew up in Mumbai…He spoke a Marwari-based mishmash at home (but did not know pure Marwari), learned a slangy Mumbaiyya Hindi and street Marathi outside the home (but never mastered good Hindi or Marathi), and learned English at school without becoming fluent in that either (he was proficient enough to work in Corporate America though). His wife was good in Hindi and English.
The other person was an Azerbaijani who went to Russian-language schools his whole life…spoke poor Russian, poor Azeri, and poor English. He used to laugh and say “There is no language I can speak really well”.
Many years ago when ABB was formed ( Asea and Brown Boveri) the official corporate language was “poor English”. No I am not joking.
All you need to know and much, much more…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English
i propose we begin with a set of tongue twisters that help you perfect the accent. if you’re learning Spanish, for example, you’ll try to say “tres tristes tigres trigo tragando en un trigal.”
can one of you FOB ESL mofos come up with an IEA version of that?
I don’t know what exactly I speak, after all these years, but when a tech support guy asked me how to spell Amrita on Monday, I had to call him out on that.
we loved having the mallus say oLymbic aszoziation of ernaguLam.
Having been in the US for over 7 years ad interacted with a lot of gujju families, I’ve heard all kinds of accents coming out of their mouth irrespective of their generations. I ve heard first and 2nd generation gujjus use very IBD accents, Desi (gawti) accents , accents with that indian touch in them and flawless american accents. But most second generation desis (ABDs) speak in american accents with that slight indian touch meaning if you were to talk to them over the phone you can conclude they are Americans of Indian ancestry. Thats just my experience. Some DBDs and their kids (ABDs) whove lived here for ever even speak with a heavy gujju accent. The most popular accent mis-pronounciations I ve heard from those DBDs mouths are “Sues” instead of “shoes” and “shocks” instead of “socks”. ” Names like “ashish” is pronounced “aasees”. Maybe it depends on where they originally come from (From towns in Gujurat). Even some gujju words and accents they use are sometimes beyond my comprehension (having grown up in mumbai my gujju vocabulary is relatively limited) Also, Gujjus from Bombay have a more polished english and gujju accent comparitively.
Ernagulam? Is that your nate-yew blace? (with apologies to Shashi Tharoor 😉 )
My DBD husband and I (a Slav) both still occasionally mix up our v’s and w’s, especially when we’re tired. Our accents sound nothing alike, but we chuckle over this common obstacle (and reminisce about the days when we didn’t know those were supposed to sound different). On the other hand, the difference between the “normal” and retroflex d (and t) still escapes me. I can sort of pronounce them differently, though the retroflex is not correct, but I sometimes don’t even hear the difference. Oh well, still a lot to learn.
Favorite accent related comment of all time: “You don’t sound the way you look” or its converse (after first meeting someone on the phone.)
I’m an ABD with what I’m told is a Chicagoan accent. Guess I need to update my Chicagoan ABD look.
Never got teased for the amma/appa thing, the fellow primary schoolers thought it was cute. My accent drifts somewhere between Dutch English, Indian English and (British) Queen’s English. Never mixed up my v’s and w’s. The parents speak convent school English. Has anyone else noticed that DBD’s have a tendency to drop articles?