linguistic follies

[Tariq Rahman]

Dear Colleagues,
  I do not work on varieties of English any more but I did write on this subject in my book
  Pakistani English (Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, 1990). The book is not widely available though the QAU library still has some copies for sale.
  However, if anyone is interested they can read my article on 'the Phonetic and Phonological features of Pakistani English' in World Englishes. The exact year and page numbers etc are given in my CV available on my website (www.tariqrahman.net).
  
Tariq Rahman
Harold Schiffman <haroldfs at gmail.com> wrote:
    I'd like bring up a study by Bansal (Bansal, R. K. 1969. The Intelligibility of Indian English. Hyderabad Da'iratu'l-Ma'arif Press.) that has always been salient for me as someone who has worked with Indian English over the years. Bansal reports that American and British native speakers of English are most "thrown off" (my term) by shifts in stress in Indian English, where stress is often shifted to the first syllable, and the vowel of the second syllable is then deleted or reduced. This results in words like "development" or "facility" being pronounced [ dEvl at pm@nt] (where I'm using "@" for shwa and capital letters to indicate stress) and [fAEsl at ti].  
   
  I find this salient because I was once thrown off by this same phenomenon (even after having read Bansal's article) while waiting in the airport in Chennai, where I heard an announcement for a plane departing for [kAElkt@].  I asked myself what city this could possibly be, since it was unknown to me, but was surely an important enough place to have air service. I learned what  it was when a passenger passed me with her boarding pass, on which was stamped "Calcutta" in large letters. It is true that in context, i.e. in a sentence where the rest of the words are unproblematical, one would not have the same problems.  But in an airport departure announcement, only the city name changes, which doesn't give any other clues. 
   
  Over the years I learned to adapt my American pronunciations whenever I was  in India to a style that was more comprehensible to Indians, but never to my knowledge did I feel the need to adjust the stress system. Whatever I did, it was judged by one hearer, after I addressed a large audience at a conference in 1995, to be very "nice", or as he put it, I didn't have that "awful American accent." 
   
  So I think this validates the claim that native BAMA speakers do not do as well as non-native speakers in understanding variant (non-native) forms of English. 
   
  Hal Schiffman
  

 
  On 7/24/07, Anthea Fraser Gupta <A.F.Gupta at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:   Re (Christopher Thomas):
"It is also hard work for even the best non-native speakers to understand other 
non-native versions of English, whereas it is no great strain for the British
or Irish to decipher the various accents."

I don't know why or how this can be claimed. Time and again, it is the native 
speaker who fails to understand or be understood by non-native speakers. NNS
are at least aware of the difficulties involved in communication that NS are
oblivious to. Is there any "good" research to definitively support either 
position?

--------

Surprisingly few studies have been done on inter-accent intelligibility (and even fewer on face to face negotiation). You might be interested in a paper I did on this. Native/non-native was not an issue here (I did not ask what the listeners' native languages were). But the findings were robust. If anyone is interested in extending this study with other groups, I'll be happy to discuss it! 

2005. Inter-accent and inter-cultural intelligibility: a study of listeners in Singapore and Britain. In D Deterding, A Brown & E L Low (eds). English in Singapore: Phonetic research on a corpus. Singapore: McGraw-Hill Education (Asia), 138-152. [ISBN 007-124727] < http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg/deterding.pdf>

       Interviews with two well matched speakers (a student from Singapore and a student from England) were played to hearers (students of English Language from Singapore and from England), who were asked to transcribe them into normal orthography. The transcriptions were scored for intelligibility of main content features, and accuracy. When listening to a familiar accent, all hearers were equally skilled, but when faced with an unfamiliar accent, hearers demonstrated a wide range of skills. It was not possible to say that one accent was intrinsically more intelligible than the other: both included features that would be challenging for a hearer unfamiliar with the accent. 

Anthea


*     *     *     *     *
Anthea Fraser Gupta (Dr)
School of English, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT <www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg >
NB: Reply to a.f.gupta at leeds.ac.uk
*     *     *     *     *





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Harold F. Schiffman 

Professor Emeritus of 
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture 
Dept. of South Asia Studies                     
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138                                       

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/    

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