Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?
One way of classifying languages is grouping them into stress-timed, syllable-timed and “mora”-timed languages.
Stress timed languages (like English) are ones where the time between stressed syllables is roughly the same. Take the phrase “I went to the store with my friend John”. Most native English speakers will stress “went”, “store”, “friend” and “John”. It might not be a big difference, but you’ll notice the “to the” between “went” and “store” is rushed, and that there’s a sort of gap between “friend” and “John” since both are stressed. (Also, if you were to modify that slightly and say “I went to the store with my friend named John”, the time between “friend” and “John” wouldn’t change much at all, you’d just slip “named” into that gap.)
Many Romance languages are seen as syllable-timed, where each syllable takes the same amount of time. In French that phrase is “Je suis allé au magasin avec mon ami John”, that’s 14 syllables, all roughly the same timing. In Spanish it’s “Fui a la tienda con mi amigo John”, 12 syllables. Unless you’re really drawing attention to one of the words, every syllable there gets roughly the same timing.
Japanese is mora timed, which is pretty similar to being syllable timed, except that when you encounter double-letters they double the length of the syllable. So, “Just a moment please” is “Chottomatte kudasai”, where the syllables with double-t letters take twice as long. The cities Tōkyō (two syllables), Ōsaka (three syllables) and Kawasaki (four syllables) all take the same amount of time to say because the “ō” symbol means that letter gets double the length of the standard “o”.
The 4 most widely spoken languages in India are Hindi (way out in front with 44% of the population speaking it as a first language), followed by Bengali, Marathi and Telugu (with about 6-8% each) The first 3 are all Indo-Aryan languages, and Telugu is a Dravidian language. The 3 Indo-Aryan languages are considered to be syllable-timed and Telugu is considered to be mora-timed.
IMO, what makes Indian-inflected English seem fast is that they’re adopting the syllable / mora timing from their primary language and using it in English. That means they spend less time on syllables / words that English speakers would stress and more time on the un-stressed syllables. The overall timing of what they say is probably similar, but in evening out the length of the syllables, they take time away from the syllables that other English speakers naturally slow down to stress. Since you tend to notice the stressed words more, since they’re rushed it seems like the entire sentence is rushed.
>BestOfLemmy
Thank you, that was a good and interesting start of the day
This is a fantastic explanation. Thank you.
Great explanation, thank you!
I remember seeing a linguist doing research into the actual timing of long Japanese vowels and finding that they weren’t actually double the length, more like 1.5 times as long (or 1.7 or something like that). I’ll have to see if I can find the article or paper again.
Yeah, that makes sense. It seems hard to lengthen a vowel out like that unless you’re actually chanting or something and are keeping to a specific rhythm.
Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower. Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
Is there anything to that? Or was that just nonsense?
Someone posted a link to just that topic here. Apparently almost all languages transmit about 39 bits per second of data. Italians use 9 syllables per second, Germans only about 5-6, but both convey the same amount of information per second. But, not all syllables are equal. Japanese has about 5 bits per syllable, English has about 7 bits per syllable. The most information dense language per syllable is apparently Vietnamese with about 8 bits per syllable.
Apparently though, the bottleneck is the brain. The end result seems to be that languages that have fewer “bits of data” per syllable say those syllables more quickly, and the ones with fewer bits of data per syllable say those syllables more slowly, so that the average is about 39 bits per second no matter what the language.
Having said that, I often listen to podcasts sped up to 1.5x speed, and I listen to podcasts while doing other things, so I guess the bottleneck is probably on the sending side rather than the receiving side.
Podcasts, being prerecorded and edited, don’t really fit this model. It’s more for a conversation with a back and forth where both interlocutors don’t know ahead of time what the other person will say. So they need to observe/listen, reflect while also coming up with answers and putting effort into being properly understood. So basically the natural context in which inter human communication evolved.
Does anyone know how the amount of information is actually derived? The article just says “researchers calculated”
They were vague about it, but they said something about converting it to computer code. I would guess they just wrote it out as ASCII text and counted how many bits of ASCII equivalent they transmitted. (Of course this ignores intonation and emphasis, but I’d guess they did ignore those.)
If that’s really what they did, it’s stupid. First, you need to find a translation for every language to ASCII, which will wildly skew the results. Second, there are many ways to express the same concept, which all vary wildly in length. Take “Hi”, 2 letters, which means exactly the same as “How are you doing?”, 14 letters.
Take “Hi”, 2 letters, which means exactly the same as “How are you doing?”, 14 letters.
It’s similar, but not exactly the same by any stretch. But, yeah, it’s not a perfect method. But, there probably isn’t a perfect method. How would you decide what “1 unit of information” is?
How would you decide what “1 unit of information” is?
I wouldn’t, because I have no knowledge in the field. But since the paper hinges upon that exact definition, and “They were vague about it”, this raises the biggest red flag I’ve seen in science yet.
Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower.
This is true.
Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
I don’t think that’s the right interpretation. There are words in English that would require sentences to be made for each if conveyed in a different language. But the same is true vice-versa.
Have a look at subtitles for movies from one language to any other. Translators struggle conveying what should be paragraph long sentences of context behind a single word for one language. Do not get me started on double speak.
Oh, interesting. I hadn’t considered that there would be variances in information density within a language, but that makes sense; “truth” is a very loaded concept that means a lot of different things in context, even though it’s only one syllable; but on the other hand “authenticity” is five syllables but carries with it a meaning that is a subset of the definition of “truth.”
I guess that’s why subtitling is even possible in different languages; if there were languages with vastly less information density than the source language, they’d need a whole screen just for the captions.
Fairly nonsense If anything I’d say it’s the other way around – there are lots of words in Hindi/Malayalam that you need 5 or 6 English words to describe
It’s not nonsense. Information density isn’t about number of words. It’s about duration and complexity of communication. And it is fairly consistent across all languages. Some languages take 3 words to say something the other can say in one, but those 3 words probably take a similar amount of brainpower and time to communicate as the one word.
I read something ( similar to this) about the maximum data transfer per second in different languages being basically the same.
Some languages with less nuance, or fewer letters/syllables have less information per syllable, but tend to speak faster, while more ‘complicated’ languages have more information per syllable, but tend to speak slower.
The general trend was a maximum amount of speech ‘data’ that could be processed by an average human brain per second.
No idea how this would relate to second languages, and how people with ‘fast’ languages react to speaking ‘slow’ ones. Would be cool to see some data/research on it. Anocdotally, a lot of people struggle to understand Indians speaking English, is that because of the accent and/or poor English (second language, don’t diss them!) or because they are speaking faster than our natural language data speed?
I used to think they spoke English as a second language too but that isn’t always the case. Indian English is its own valid dialect and is a learned way of speaking as a first language. (Source - married an Indian, traveled India, seen some schools there, saw kids/family members studying, etc…)
Funnily enough, IIRC Anglo-Indians have recognized minority status and have their own special designated member of the Indian Parliament
That’s fair, I read the other comment about it actually being the common language throughout India which is interesting. I guess it’s just a more extreme version of the US/UK/AU English differences, we may differ over time, but should remain close enough to understand 99% of the time
I have a hard time with Indian accents. I think part of it is they stringwordstogether and don’t separate them.
it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.
Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…
Oh that reminded me of one time I was in hospital really sick & an Indian doctor was examining me. She said, “Do you have any wessicles?” Ummm what is that? “Wessicles… I can’t remember the English word…” She tried describing wessicles and it hit me - blisters. “Yes, yes! Blisters!” She had actually been saying vesicles, which to be fair I would have to have looked up if I came across it in a book. We had a good laugh, she diagnosed me correctly, I got the right meds, and I recovered.
What do you mean by accent syllables?
Many Indian languages allow words in a logical unit to be stringed together as long as it sounds okay (so basically, avoid consonant - consonant joining).
My hypothesis in this regard is that English has specially slow vowels because it’s encoding a lot of information in said vowels. As in: they need to be slower to be distinguishable.
And, when speakers of language A learn language B, they tend to transfer A’s prosody into B. (I believe that this should be uncontroversial as a claim.) That might even get ingrained into a local variety, like Indian English as L1.
So the hard time that people have understanding those Indian English speakers and L2 English speakers from India would be mostly that they don’t get which vowel the Indian speaker is conveying. For example “bit”, “beet”, “bait” sounding almost identical. That goes side-to-side with what you said about “faster than our natural language data speed”, as they’re effectively encoding more info into a certain amount of time than other speakers are able to decode.
Thanks for the link, I found it very interesting!
I work in maritime, often alongside Indian counterparts who speak both English to me and Indian to their ship mates.
Yes, they do speak Indian just as fast. Yes, the way they speak English has a lot to do with the cadence of how they speak their native language.
As far as the flow goes, I’ve noticed that Indian does flow better than English just listening to it, but I don’t know enough of it to make that observation with any credibility.
There is no “indian” languaje, there is a myriad of languajes spoken in india, what you might be refering to is hindi, which is very wildly spoken.
I have two indian friends that speak english with each other cause their native languajes are so different that they do no understand each other and one of then do no speak hindi.
I figured that was the case, but I don’t know any of it, so I didn’t know better. Thanks for clarifying.
Tbh I know that only cause I made the same mistake and one of those two friends explained to me!
English (for various reasons) is kinda the only common language throughout India. There isn’t actually one non-English language that you can learn and be understood throughout ALL of India, (e.g. if someone from the state of Punjab goes to the state of Tamil Nadu, they likely might need to speak English to understand each other though there are always exceptions to this) so English is very commonly spoken throughout India. As with any English speaking country, the language has changed within India and Southeast Asia over time (there is regional slang/expressions/colloquialisms unique to SE Asia like calling the ‘truck’ or ‘boot’ of a car the ‘dickie/dicky’). Many of the other languages spoken throughout India are more strict in their phonetics, e.g. each syllable has a specific sound and doesn’t change based on the surrounding syllables. Many English speakers who learn in India likely end up using this kind of speech pattern with English as well, leading to a different cadence in pronunciation than in other regions of the world. There are times it sounds faster, but pay attention and see if you can notice if the person speaking is using more syllables or pronouncing parts of the word you might skip over in the same word, but just faster.
i didn’t know about that side of india, thanks for sharing!
Re: dickie for car boot (what Americans would call the ‘trunk’); some old two-seater cars had a third seat in the boot, known as a ‘dickie-seat’, at least in the UK, so perhaps it’s an old term that still survives in Indian English.
It goes back even further than that.
An 1865 dictionary of American English uses “boot” instead of “trunk” to refer to the… well trunks that were strapped to the front and back of a coach. (A coach being a specific kind of horse-drawn carriage, which takes its name from the village of Kocs in Hungary where they were popular.)
https://archive.org/details/americandictiona00websuoft/page/152/mode/2up
https://www.etymonline.com/word/coach
In that 1865 dictionary, a Dickey (or Dicky) is defined as “A seat behind a carriage, for servants &c”, and a Rumble as “A boot with a seat above it for servants, behind a carriage.”
https://archive.org/details/americandictiona00websuoft/page/1156/mode/2up
So, originally in American English, the trunks strapped to the outside of a carriage were called “boots”, and the seats above them were “rumbles”, and maybe when there was no “boot”, just a seat for servants they were called “dickies”.
In Indian English somehow the “seat on the outside of a carriage” became the “compartment in the back of a vehicle for storing things”. In British English they kept the name “boot” when it changed from an external box to a box that was part of the vehicle itself. And, in American English, they switched to calling it a “trunk”, most likely before it actually became part of the vehicle.
The oddity here is English, not the languages spoken in India. It’s easy to show it by comparing vowel duration in a few languages:
- Telugu (Dravidian) - short vowels are 70~90ms, long vowels 180~195ms
- Hindi (Indo-European) - vowels are 100~180ms long
- Spanish (Indo-European) - vowels are 130~150ms long (NB: I’m analysing the data for native speakers)
- Japanese (Japonic) - tables IV-V show some data for a short /a/, 70~112ms. I’d expect the long vowels to be thus around 140~220ms, if simply doubling it (Japanese is mostly moraic after all, and open vowels tend to be longer)
- English (Indo-European) - 85~420ms
So yes, your typical language spoken in India is spoken faster than English. That doesn’t say much because probably most languages are spoken faster than English.
Also, keep in mind that “Indian languages” isn’t that useful of a label. It’s a lot like lumping together Basque, Italian, Russian, Hungarian and Maltese as “European languages” - sure, it can be done, but odds are that you won’t get any meaningful conclusion out of it, you know?
Well I don’t know enough to differentiate “that’s a Sanskrit accent” and “that’s a Hindi accent” etc.
I think British English put more and longer emphasis on vowels. It’s almost like they speak in vowels only. Compared to Canadian English, Indian accents are still fast.
The key here is that you’ll probably find the exact same “oddity” among speakers of other languages, even outside India.
I think British English put more and longer emphasis on vowels. It’s almost like they speak in vowels only. Compared to Canadian English, Indian accents are still fast.
I feel like you might have unearthed something interesting here.
The English varieties spoken in those countries like Canada, Belize, USA, Jamaica, etc. had plenty recent interaction with multiple other languages; specially Canada with French and Belize with Spanish. On the other hand, what people usually call “British English” is mostly Standard Southern British (up/middle class, around London), a bit too far away from any meaningful linguistic influence.
So I’m wondering if the two patterns aren’t actually the same pattern. I’m just hypothesising though, this might be incorrect.
Well British English is soft like many European languages. I remember listening to a video on sounds of different languages and was surprised that British English sounded so similarly soft as other European languages.
The problem is that Indian languages belong to three or four language families. In contrast, all European languages (except Basque, Hungarian and Finnish) belong to one language family.
Put another way, Hindi, Sanskrit and English are more similar to each other (all Indo-European) than any of them are to Ladakhi (Sino-Tibetan), Munda (Austroasiatic) or Tamil (Dravidian).
When an Indian speaks English as a second language, it will be influenced by their first language. But the effect of Punjabi would be quite different from that of Telegu, which in turn would be quite different from that of Zo.
You haven’t met the man from Strabane, have you? https://youtu.be/XhGbpatmplQ?feature=shared
I’m not an expert on this, and I’m not trying to sound I know everything, but I’m an Indian and have spent 20 years of my life speaking Hindi, which is one of the widely known and spoken language in India, especially in North India. I think this is related to how the language is structured and the way consonants and vowels are used in the “Lipi” (I wasn’t able to find an English word for it, but you think of it as the set of symbols with which the language is written.) of Indian languages. The Lipi for Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Maithli and many other languages is Devnagari. And It has a somewhat complex structure to it, more complex than English. Like English has 5 vowels and are used directly in the middle of consonants. But in Devnagari, you can see there are traditionally 13 vowels and every vowel can be used independently or dependently in a word, which means you can have a vowel appended or pretended to each consonant, and that will produce a different sound. A kid in India in his early age is taught to identify each of that sound and he uses all that early knowledge and learning, all his life when he talks. This allows him to create and follow different sound patterns and makes his speech continuous and flow-full, which I think you’re referring to as being fast. I find other languages like Mandarin has a similar structure, and makes me learn about them even more.
Lipi is basically alphabet bhai (or written script)
well correction English has 20 vowels, depending on dialect
Vowel has 2 definitions that conflict.
One definition is the letters ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, and ‘u’ (and sometimes ‘y’). The other is the speech sound without any blockage or constricting of the vocal tract. Vowel letters are used in written English to indicate vowel sounds, but because English is a pain in the ass, there’s no 1 to 1 match between the 5(ish) vowel letters and the 20+ vowel sounds.
As I said I don’t know much about the topic, I presented my thoughts.
I think the guy you responded to was making a joke about how some native English speakers talk
No, they were pointing out that, even though English doesn’t use a separate symbol for each phonemic vowel sound, there are 20 distinct vowel phonemes in the language.
If we gave each its own letter, there would be 20 lettered vowels in English. Which would probably make English easier to learn.
This is why “bay,” “bat,” and “bar” have completely different vowel sounds even though it’s the same letter. And you just have to “know” the difference because there is no separate vowel to distinguish them.
I think this is just a dialectical thing. For comparison listen to a Mexican speaking Spanish vs someone from Spain. Very different cadence.
I think there’s a vast difference in south India and north India. South Indians tend to speak a lot faster.
There was a recent paper saying exactly this.
I’m curious even with the different ways of stressing syllables if there is also a causal link between population density and speaking speed, similar to walking speed differences measured in rural and urban environments. Like if there is some mechanism like walking quickly to get through timed crosswalks vs larger group conversations with less time to get your point across or jump in without interrupting.
Edit: I also noticed as an English only speaker when speaking with Indians who speak English and one or more Indian languages they will sometimes repeat the last sentence you say as you finish saying it as a way to jump into the conversation or indicate agreement or having something to say but I’m not sure if that is culturally Indian or more broadly Asian, etc. if anyone has some insight into that language style.
