I notice Indians speaking English tend to speak very fast. Are the Indian languages simply spoken faster?

BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 215 points –

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?

55

You are viewing a single comment

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.