Speaker
Description
Northeast India is one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world, where English plays a very important role in communication, education, and administration. Hundreds of languages belonging to three different language families, viz. Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan, and Austro-Asiatic coexist within a dense multilingual environment (Fuchs et al., 2025). Although English is widely used as a lingua franca in this region, systematic phonetic studies of second-language English produced by speakers from various linguistic backgrounds in Northeast India remain limited. As noted by Flege (1995), variation in second-language pronunciation is often influenced by speakers’ first language (L1) phonological systems, and similar L1 transfer effects have been documented in studies of English spoken by speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages in Northeast India. This study, therefore, asks the following research question: To what extent does English speech produced by multilingual speakers from distinct linguistic backgrounds in Northeast India exhibit systematic phonetic variation within a shared multilingual environment? Tackling this question provides new empirical evidence on the phonetic realisation of English in Northeast India and offers a sociophonetic perspective on the use of English in multilingual settings.
This study focuses on English speech produced by young adult speakers from Northeast India whose first languages belong to Assamese, Angami, Khasi, Meiteilon, and Mizo, representing the three major language families. The speakers belong to a comparable age cohort (approx. 18-35 years), enabling the study to examine variation within a broadly similar generation while also considering possible variation across younger and older speakers within this group. The dataset comprises controlled read-speech recordings of the same passage; lexical content is controlled, enabling direct comparison of phonetic patterns across speakers. Acoustic analysis of the recordings is performed with Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2024) to investigate temporal organisation and phonetic realisation in connected speech. The analysis focuses on speech rhythm, the structure of vowel and consonant intervals, and patterns of vowel realisation in stressed and unstressed syllables. Rhythm metrics used in this study are based on the proportion of vocalic intervals in the utterance (%V), the standard deviation of vocalic interval durations (ΔV) and the standard deviation of consonantal interval durations (ΔC) (Ramus et al., 1999), pairwise variability indices (nPVI, rPVI) to capture durational variability between successive interval (Grabe et al., 2002), rate-normalised interval measures (VarcoC and VarcoV) which allow rhythmic variation to be assessed independently of speech rate (Dellwo, 2006; White & Mattys, 2007). In addition, vowel reduction and durational differences between stressed and unstressed syllables are examined to explore possible influences of speakers’ first languages on English speech production.
By examining phonetic patterns in English speech within a shared multilingual environment, this study highlights the possibility of internal phonetic variation shaped by speakers’ linguistic backgrounds and the broader multilingual ecology of the region. The findings will contribute to further research on multilingual language use and World Englishes by providing empirical evidence on how multilingual linguistic environments may influence the phonetic realisation of English within a single generation of speakers.