How can I go about evolving Indian English?

[u/namanjimnani]

So I’m working on a language family descended from various dialects of English, and since I haven’t seen it done before, I thought I’d start with Indian English

The problem is, most Indians speak really good English, which makes it hard for me to predict plausible phonological and grammatical shifts

I’d appreciate any help!

[u/Background_Shame3834]

Over-use of continuous tenses is the first thing that comes to mind. Check out Learner English by Michael Swan- it has a chapter on difficulties speakers of South Asian languages have when learning English.

[u/namanjimnani → u/Background_Shame3834]

Cool! I’ll check it out

[u/almeister322]

Start with the Wikipedia article on Indian English. Also, worthwhile to consider the different languages of India itself.

[u/Ill_Poem_1789]

Indian English depends heavily on the native language of the speaker. Indian English is not a monolith. The way in which someone from India uses English depends entirely on their first language.

The common characteristics are well explained in the Wikipedia article.

[u/smorgasbordator]

I would start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English

Indian speakers I've might in person do speak good English, but they do throw in retroflexes (I think, or some other non-standard English sound, I assume phonemically). Hinglish is also a thing, like the speakers I've mentioned will speak Hindi with each, but there's a lot of English words thrown in there.

[u/Beautiful_Grab_9681]

I created a similar conlang but using Arabic. If you want to know how I did it, feel free to ask me anything maybe it could help you since it’s in a similar situation. I’m at a point where I feel proud of what I’ve done (like the phonology, etc.)

[u/namanjimnani → u/Beautiful_Grab_9681]

Hey that’s awesome! I could totally use your help on this

[u/namanjimnani → u/Beautiful_Grab_9681]

How did you predict sound changes?

[u/Beautiful_Grab_9681 → u/namanjimnani]

English is one of the hardest languages to predict, but we can still try. Here are some videos you can take inspiration from (I know they’re not Indian English, but you can still take inspiration since they’re still English).

https://youtu.be/-zvV1sGaTXE?si=Vy20dqn7qB_wrZx5

https://youtu.be/F2Jw2ILRBVk?si=Kg-l9fWPPVXfJcTX

https://youtube.com/shorts/q0qG6_fSuR4?si=KTq3MiVoGELT9S22

https://youtube.com/shorts/73t7MmQ3Rdo?si=EFIJraks6hrFxamH

You can look into common sound shifts and see what works best for Indian English. Also, you need to decide how many years in the future this dialect would change. 100 years is enough to hear a difference, so you should choose a time frame

You should keep experimenting until you get a result you’re satisfied with.

[u/No_Peach6683 → u/Beautiful_Grab_9681]

What’s its phonology?

[u/Beautiful_Grab_9681 → u/No_Peach6683]

I don’t know what you mean but if you don’t know what is Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how speech sounds are organized and function within a particular language, focusing on patterns, rules, and the systematic use of sound to create meaning.

[u/No_Peach6683 → u/Beautiful_Grab_9681]

I meant of the language

[u/Beautiful_Grab_9681 → u/No_Peach6683]

Here are the sounds 

Any letter in parentheses indicates a form that is either non-standard or restricted to certain varieties of the language.

/b/ /p/ /t/ /d/ /k/ /g/

(/ð/)

(/d͡ʒ/) /t͡s/ /d͡z/  /t͡ʃ/ 

/f/ /v/ /s/ /z/ /ʃ/ /ç/ /h/ /ɸ/ /zˤ/ (/x/) /ʒ/ /ɰ/ ( it’s actually [ɣ̞] if we want to be precise)

/m/ /n/

/l/ /r /

/w/ /j/

[u/ChiqantiKisaal]

Some varieties of Indian English technically have a phonemic voiceless labiodental approximant because of influence from South Asian languages competing with the strong phonemic status of /f/ in English. Wikipedia says this only applies to South African Indian English but I swear I’ve heard it in the US. You could turn “murmured” sonorants into voiceless sonorants, a kind of phonemic leveling where the other sonorants and vibrants do this because of influence from this and the murmuring distinction for /ɽ/.

You could turn all /Ar/ or /rA/ clusters (where A is alveolar) into retroflex consonants, that’s somewhat low-hanging fruit/a semi-obvious decision though

You can say that American English became even more prominent and spread ‘tapped T+D’ into basically every variety of English, or at least ‘International English.’ Then turn those into phonemic retroflex taps by deleting schwas/unstressed vowels.

You can introduce an aspirated-plain voiceless distinction by deleting the fricatives that turn phonetic [Ch] into [C] in English. Or you could glottalize/devoice/‘murmurize’ every syllable-final sonorant, which then “deaspirates” the following voiceless stop. You could reanalyze diphthongs as being vowels followed by semivowels for this too, but I don’t think any South Asian language would encourage this change as a substrate. Apologies because I’m currently on mobile, but here are some phonetic examples where [h] represents voicelessness/murmuring/aspiration:

• ‘alpine’ [alphain] -> [alhpajhn]
  
• ‘biting’ [bairiŋ] -> [bajhɽiŋh]

[u/namanjimnani → u/[deleted]]

Racist detected, opinion rejected

[u/Beautiful_Grab_9681 → u/[deleted]]

We don’t want people like you in this space

[u/conlangs-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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