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?

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    1·
    8 months ago

    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?