Discussion Details
| Title: | The supposed Welsh-Hindi link |
| Submitter: | Briony Williams |
| Description: | In Linguist 16.970 (Tuesday March 15th 2005) Anthony Green highlighted a
BBC news story on the supposed similarity between a Welsh English accent and a Hindi English accent: see http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-790.html He writes: ''At http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4328733.stm there's a story about a BBC journalist from India, now living in Wales, who has noticed 'peculiar similarites' between the Indian accent and the Welsh accent of English, and calling on professional linguists to help her figure out why.'' The similarity betwen Welsh-accented English and the English spoken by Asian language speakers has long been noted. For example, Mark Green (no relation?) notes: ''... though you have to be careful with Welsh because if you're not careful a bad Welsh accent pretty soon starts to sound like a good Pakistani one.'' (see http://www.licc.org.uk/articles/article.php/id/139 ) The cause is probably the fact that, in regularly-stressed Welsh polysyllables, the linguistic stress falls on the penultimate syllable, but the pitch peak actually falls on the immediately following unstressed syllable - the ultima. This is the syllable that has high pitch, and also is more likely to contain an phonologically long vowel. It's likely that this pattern was taken over into Welsh-accented English, so that the intonation peak falls on the unstressed syllable immediately AFTER the stressed syllable. This might be one source of the perceived similarity between Welsh and Hindi/Pakistani etc. Anthony Green continues: '' In my opinion, her speculations are unlikely to yield any useful results. I can predict what the results of any serious linguistic comparison will be: Welsh and Hindi are both pitch-accent languages, resulting in superficial intonational similarities in the respective accents of English. The fact that Welsh and Hindi are both pitch-accent languages is probably coincidental, as Welsh at least does not preserve the Proto-Indo-European pitch accent (Proto-Celtic almost certainly had a stress accent). And calling Indo-European 'the mother of all languages' is just absurd, and really shoddy journalism.'' Welsh USED to be a pitch-accent language, but since the Old Welsh Accent Shift it has become a stress language. However, there is a residue of the old accent seen in the delayed pitch peak described above. In the case of stressed monosyllabic words, however, the situation is simpler: the pitch peak, length, etc are all seen on the stressed single syllable. However, the prosodic similarities will no doubt continue to provide entertaining fodder for journalists. Briony Williams (University of Wales, Bangor) |
| Date Posted: | 16-Mar-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Phonology |
| Language Specialty: |
English
Hindi Welsh |
| LL Issue: | 16.802 |
| Posted: | 16-Mar-2005 |
