Attitudes towards Indian English among young urban professionals in Hyderabad, India

Abstract

Despite extensive work on the description of Indian English(es), only limited attention has been paid to attitudes towards the variety among its speakers. This paper reports on semi‐structured interviews eliciting language attitudes with 32 educated young students and professionals in Hyderabad, India. Results reveal that Indian English is occupying an increasingly legitimate position within the popular consciousness, and that there is an increasing sense of ownership of a supra‐local or pan‐dialectal ‘Indian English’. There is an expressed desire for Indian English to continue to expand, and to be accepted as one of the authentic languages of India. The participants exhibited relatively high levels of linguistic security, and while a certain ‘nostalgia’ for British English was retained by some, Indian English appears to be emerging as an authentic carrier of Indian identity.

The Impact of Race on Speech Perception and Accentedness Judgements in Racially Diverse and Non-diverse Groups

“…Moreover, speakers of regional varieties are granted native speaker status. This status is not granted to those who speak a foreign variety of English, despite it being the case that these speakers often grow up hearing and using their own variety of English from birth or from an early age (Maxwell et al 2021).…”

“…Therefore, intelligibility (i.e., transcription accuracy) and accentedness judgments were collected to assess whether listeners' ability to transcribe sentences and their subjective accentedness judgments of these varieties are impacted by the race of the faces. American, British, and Indian English were chosen as they reflect the different racialized ideologies (e.g., see Kutlu 2020; Kutlu and Wiltshire 2020; Maxwell et al 2021) and represent a hierarchy of prestige through their historical evolution (i.e., codification and association with powerful groups; see Dragojevic (2020)).…”