Wednesday 2 December 2009

CANADIAN AND INDIAN ACCENT

Manuel Alejandro Hernández Mendoza

Last class we looked at some different English accents, some of them caught my attention for example the canadian accent. It is little different from standar English for example the English raising, this phenomenon occurs in dipthongs that are before voiceless consonants e.g. /p/ /t/ /k/ /s/ f/. and talking about vowel dipthong there are some changes of sounds for example the word eye /aI/ turns into /­­Ai/ and /au/ changes to /AU/. it is said that this changes exist because of the French influnce, but it is also said that the phenomenon of raising historically to a similar phenomenon that exists in scottish English. The Scottish Vowel length rule lengthens a wide variety of vowel sounds in several environments, and shorthens them in others; "long" environments include include when the vowel precedes a number of voiced consonants fricatives and /r/, whereas Canadian raising is not limited in this fashion; thus , it may represent a sort of merging of the scots vowel length rule with the general english rule lengtheningvowels before voiced consonants of any sort.

if you want to know how Canadian accent sounds click on the next link
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nzoo6_l0&feature=realted

Indian accent
also knonw as south Asian English is primarily spoken in the Indian Subcontinent. I found something interesting here, for example the use of "isn`t it" a generic question tag, as in

you are lying, isn`t it? instead of You are lying, aren`t you?
i am the best, ìsn`it?

more recent question tags include "no?" used coloquially
he`s here, no?

an important feature talking about vowels is that they used in words that have an "a" in them for example hat, cap, staff, stab the sound of the letter "a" as we use it in spanish. They also add in some words that finish with the sound /t/ the letter "u" example Left, leftU -but, butU.
finally i would like to mention that they stress long words often in the first or second syllabe for example `communicative instead of commu`nicative

if you like you can click ojn the next link in order to know hos indian accent is

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw6RgIf6epQ

2 comments:

  1. i´m sorry i forgot the sources www.wikipedia.com
    www.soundcomparisons.com, www.soundboard.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for adding in your sources, Manuel.

    It would be interesting to see some examples of the features of the Canadian accent that you mention. I'm afraid the YouTube link doesn't seem to work, so I wasn't able to see the video link that you included for that accent.

    ReplyDelete