ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

An Investigation of Indian Native Language Phonemic Influences on L2 English Pronunciations

Shelly Jain, Priyanshi Pal, Anil Kumar Vuppala, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, Chiranjeevi Yarra

Speech systems are sensitive to accent variations. This is a challenge in India, which has numerous languages but few linguistic studies on pronunciation variation. The growing number of L2 English speakers reinforces the need to study accents and L1-L2 interactions. We investigate Indian English (IE) accents and report our observations on regional and shared features. Specifically, we observe phonemic variations and phonotactics in speakers' native languages and apply this to their English pronunciations. We demonstrate the influence of 18 Indian languages on IE by comparing native language features with IE pronunciations obtained from literature studies and phonetically annotated speech. Hence, we validate Indian language influences on IE by justifying pronunciation rules from the perspective of Indian language phonology. We obtain a comprehensive description of generalised and region-specific IE characteristics, which facilitates accent adaptation of existing speech systems.