Indian English has many a times been un-intelligible by the British listeners or the native Englishmen. The question is why? Indians have progressed a long way to achieve a long line of successes, then why not in English?



English over the years has turned into an unphonetic language. Many languages have migrated into English and many variations of English have been developed. The link between the speech sounds and the spellings has been broken unlike in may other languages. Indian languages are all mostly phonetic. This difference has been creating a barrier in front of the Indian mass to make proper pronunciations in English. A child learning and speaking completely phonetic languages from birth cannot all of a sudden start speaking an unphonetic language of course, same goes for the people of India.

Indian speakers acquainted with the phonetic languages often tend to replace English sounds by their Indian equivalents.  Wrong accentual patterns prevail leaving important words unaccented in connected speech. There are also the faulty rhythmic patterns, faulty division of a long utterance into tone group, wrong location of the nucleus or the tonic syllable in the tone group which are part of the causes. These are some main reasons of the unintelligibility of Indian English to foreigners.

The difference between general Indian English and educated southern British English is known as received pronunciation (R.P.). General Indian English lacks in some places like:

• It lacks the category /3/. It is variously replaced by /s/ or /z/ as in words such as measure and garage.
• Indian English lacks the distinction between /v/ and /w/. Most speakers replace English /v/ and /w/ by [v]. Consequently, the contrast between vest and west, vine and wine, is lost.
• It turns the fricative categories /θ/ , /ð/ into additional stops or dental plosives. /θ/ is replaced by [th] or [t] and /ð/ is replaced by [d]. Hence they is misunderstood as day, and like it many other words are also misunderstood.
• Speakers of Indian English many a time use unaspired [p]. [t], [k] for aspired [ph], [th], [kh] at the beginning of accented syllables. Aspiration is an important feature of native English.
• Sometimes some Indian speakers substitute /s/ for /z/. House has /s/ as the final sound whereas noise has /z/, though the spelling is identical. The letter s is pronounced /s/ in hopes but /z/ in dogs. The letter x is /ks/ in expect but /gs/ in exact. Indian speakers and students are used to a 'spelling pronunciation'. They go by the spelling and use the sound suggested by the spelling.
• Most Indian speakers find the super-segmental features of English very difficult. their accentual patterns are often faulty. Very often they place the accent on the wrong syllable of a word.
• They also commit mistakes of intonation. They fail to divide a long utterance into tone groups and often misplace the nucleus or the tonic syllable. They are also not exact in the choice of an appropriate tone.
• The sounds /tʃ/, /dʒ/ are made more with the blade than with the tip of the tongue, and also with the lip-rounding associated with the R.P. sounds. As a result, they give a less shap acoustic impression than their R.P. counter-parts.
• /t,d/ are generally replaced by the retroflex /t d/.
• While retaining /n̩/ in the final position, Indian speakers usually add a /g/ in the medial positions.
• Syllabic /l,m,n/ are usually replaced by the sequences /əl, əm, ən/, or if a high front vowel preceeds, by /il, im, in/.
• Many Indian speakers fail to make clear distinction between /e/ and /ae/, and between /ɔ/ and /ɔ:/.
• In R.P. the five long vowels and the diphthongs are relatively longer than the other vowels but the length is reduced before voiceless consonants. In general Indian English the long vowels tend to be shortened in unaccented positions. R.P. has weak vowels in unaccented syllables. This feature is not consistently observed in general Indian English.