Tom Pullman

[Elizabeth J. Pyatt]

Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 21:35:40 +0000
From: Tom Pullman <tjop2 at cam.ac.uk>


>At http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4328733.stm there's a story
>about a BBC journalist from India, now living in Wales, who has noticed
>'peculiar similarites' between the Indian accent and the Welsh accent of
>English, and calling on professional linguists to help her figure out why.
>
>In my opinion, her speculations are unlikely to yield any useful results. I
>can predict what the results of any serious linguistic comparison will be:
>Welsh and Hindi are both pitch-accent languages, resulting in superficial
>intonational similarities in the respective accents of English.

I'm pretty sure that Welsh is not in any way a pitch accent language.
No two words in Welsh can be distinguished by pitch contours, as far
as I know.

The answer is related to pitch, though: I've always thought that the
similarity lies in the fact that both Welsh English and Indian
English make liberal use of L*+HL pitch accents in their intonational
systems (/not/ pitch accent or tone systems; no variety of English
possesses either of these, to my knowledge). That is, speakers of
these varieties very often produce the most stressed syllable in an
utterance with a low pitch, the following syllable with a high pitch,
and the syllable after that with a low pitch again, or if there are
fewer than two syllables before the end of the utterance, then the
low-high-low pattern compressed onto however many are available.

This pitch accent is a relatively rare one in most varieties of
English, though it does exist, and is quite striking to speakers of
varieties where it is rare; in most (I think) varieties of British
English, for example, it expresses surprise, which is quite
attention-grabbing. Therefore its frequent use in both Welsh and
Indian English stands out and makes them sound similar to speakers of
other varieties.

Tom Pullman
--
o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o

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