PART IX
How to speak British, course 205
India and South Asia English accents [Mayalasia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal]:
Among the polyglot of languages, dialects, and accents, spoken in South Asia and the Indian subcontinent, there are a fairly large number of distinct dialects of English spoken. A smattering of the distinct major languages include: Hindi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Marathi, Odia, Maithili, Mal-ayalam, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu, Urdu, and a host of others; from them have been created a variety of accents of English. India alone has 780 separate languages written in 66 different scripts.
Accents originating in this part of the world tend to display several distinctive features, including: syllable-timing, in which a roughly equal time is allocated to each syllable, akin to the English of Singapore and Malaysia. Elsewhere, English speech timing is based predominantly on stress; sing-song pitch, somewhat reminiscent of those of Welsh English. In addition, one hears retroflexion of “t” and “d” [A term in phonetics for sounds, especially “r”, made with the tip of the tongue curled back and raised towards the palate—rhotic or hard, crisp “r”s. These r-sounds occur in such rhotic varieties of English as AmE [non-Southern].
Philippine English:
In the Philippines there are some 85 definitely mutually unintelligible though genetically related languages of the Malayo-Polynesian family, such as Tagalog [Filipino is the standardized version of Tagalog with 43 million speakers], Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray, and Bicol, making it a linguistic mosaic. These languages of the home serve as substrates whose features have variously influenced the development of Philippine English. There are many hundreds of dialects in the Philippines representing variations of no fewer than 120 distinct languages, and many of these languages maintain greater differences than those between established European languages like French and Spanish. Taglish is an unofficial melding of English and Tagalog.
Philippine English in the 7,000 islands generally employs a rhotic accent that originated from the time when it was first introduced by the Americans during the colonization period in an attempt to replace Spanish as the dominant political language. There are no “f” or “v” sounds in most native languages in the Philippines; so [p] is used as an alternative to “f” as [b] is to “v”. The words “fifty”, “five”, and “filopina” are often pronounced as “pipty”, “pibe, and “pilipina,” by many Filipinos. Educated Filipinos aim at an AmE accent but have varying success with the vowel contrasts in sheep /ship, full/fool, and boat/bought.
Also, “three” becomes “tri” and that becomes “dat”. “Three of these” is spoken as “tree of dese”. This feature is consistent with many other Malayo-Polynesian languages. “Z” is often softened to [s]—the opposite of Spanish–so words like “zoo”, “measure”, and “beige” may be pronounced [su], [meesoɾ], and [beidz]. Filipinos often have an inability to pronounce certain fricatives, including: f,v,o,z, and hard s.
There is no single Philippine English accent because native languages influence spoken English in so many different ways throughout the archipelago. E.g. Visayans usually interchange the sounds “e” and “i” as well as “o” and “u” because the distinction between those phonemes is not very pronounced in Visayan languages.
Filipino/Tagalog is not a tonal language and can be considered a pitch-accent language and a syllable-timed language. Tagalog is widely spoken and is the most understood language in all the Philippine Regions. It has nine basic parts of speech. The following features occur at all social levels: 1. Loss of the singular inflection of verbs: The family home rest on the bluff of a hill; One of the boys give a report to the teacher every morning. 2. Use of present perfect for simple past: I have seen her yesterday=I saw her yesterday and past perfect for present perfect: He had already gone home=He has already gone home. 3. Use of the continuous tenses for habitual aspect: He is going to school regularly=He goes to school regularly. 4. Use of the present forms of auxiliary verbs in subordinate noun clauses rather than past forms, and vice versa: He said he has already seen you=He said he had already seen you; She hoped that she can visit you tomorrow=She hoped that she could visit you tomorrow.
People from the northern Philippines may pronounce “r” as a strong “rrr” trill instead of an American tap, which is more commonly used in the rest of the Philippines because the trill is a feature of the Ilocano language.
Examples of the Filipino English dialect include borrowings from 1. Spanish: as alto=a surprise party; bienvenida=a welcome party, despedida=a farewell party, Don/Doña title= prom-inent man/woman; estafa= a fraud/scandal; merienda=mid-afternoon tea; plantilla=faculty assignments and deployment in an academic department; querida=a mistress; viand=a dish served to accompany rice in a Filipino meal. 2. Tagalog: boondock=bundok (a mountain; carabao=kalabaw, a water buffalo; kundiman=a love song; Sampaloc=sampalok, fruit of the tamarind; tao man=common tao/karaniwang tao, a person. 3. Loan translations: open the light/radio=turn on the light/radio; since before yet==for a long time; joke only=I’m teasing you; is playing and playing=he keeps on playing, making the foolishness of children/misbehaving; I am ashamed to you=I am embarrassed because I have been asking you so many favors. 4. Local neologisms: agrupation from Spanish agrupación=a group, captain-ball team captain in basketball; carnap=to steal/kidnap a car/cope with something; hold-upper=a criminal who engages in armed holdups; jeepney=blending jeep and jitney/AmE-a small bus/a jeep converted into a passenger vehicle (usually gaudy and noisy). Other examples are: birdie=childish slang for penis-popularized by the Parokya ni Edgar song Don’t Touch My Birdie; crocodile=corrupt politician; duster=simple sun dress; fiscal=public prosecutor/solicitor; gimmick=unplanned night out with friends; maniac=pervert; motel=love hotel/no-tell motel; rugby=contact/rubber cement; salvage=a person being killed by a gang in some locations and the cadaver thrown onto a large space such as a river, roadside or vacant land; (verb) to kill a person in a similar fashion; tickler=small notebook that fits in the pocket; tricycle=auto rickshaw using a motorcycle or sidecar rig; viand=item of food eaten with rice; rice topping or side dish; American/Americano/kano=White/Caucasian person; banana cue=skewered plantains sprinkled with sugar and grilled. Served hot; batchmate=student who graduated at the same time; boodle fight=gathering where food e.g. pansit, [steamed rice and sardines is served on old newspapers or banana leaves spread over a table and eaten with bare hands by a group of people]; dirty ice cream=generic ice cream sold by street vendors; Filipino time/Pinoy time=habitual lateness of Filipinos; green joke=off color humor/ribaldry; high blood=highly angered; number two=mistress; nosebleed= serious difficulty conversing in English with a fluent or native English speaker, also anxiety during an examination, job interview, or being afraid to be judged by others for not using proper grammar.
