On some features of consonants in Indian English

• Main Author: Gabriela-Anidora Brozbă
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti 2011-11-01
• Series: Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics
• Subjects: fricatives; stops; liquids; aspiration; retroflexion
• Online Access: http://bwpl.unibuc.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BWPL-_2011-_nr-2-_Brozba.pdf

The paper aims to show that although the inventory of consonantal phonemes in Indian English does not differ markedly from that of RP, there are some aspects related mainly to different articulations of the sounds discussed which make it sound very peculiar. Thus, the dental fricatives may often be substituted by the correspondent stops; the stops have may have different aspirations patterns and retroflex articulations; the lateral liquid phoneme does not have any allophones in this variety. The non-rhoticity of post-vocalic /r/ is a feature which brings it closer to RP, but this seems to be changing, at least in some parts of the country. This analysis is at the interface between phonetics and phonology, in the sense that phonetic evidence is provided in support of phonological assumptions.