Indian English and American English differ in stress

What is it about?

We looked at the differences in stress between Indian English and American English. A previous article in World Englishes (Pickering and Wiltshire 2000) had suggested that one difference is that the stressed syllable in Indian English (IE) falls in pitch but changes little in loudness, relative to American English (AE).. In this study, we show that the results of Pickering and Wiltshire (2000) may be due to a misinterpretation of the position of stress in IE. By considering the louder syllable to be the stressed one in Indian English, we find that although the stress correlates are weaker in size, they are in the same direction. We do confirm Pickering and Wiltshire's claims that the phonetic correlates of AE and IE stressed syllables do differ; combined with the fact that the position of stress may differ, there is a potential for communication problems between speakers of different varieties.

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Why is it important?

We provide a method for comparing different varieties of English in terms of stress phonetically and phonologically, and this may also shed light on miscommunications among speakers of different dialects