The vociferous rise and protracted collapse of the British Empire over the last half millennium has shaped modern linguistics perhaps more dramatically than any other human phenomenon. Famously, at its zenith, the sun never set on the Union Jack, and therefore on the Anglosphere. Within a postmodern context, including the presence of the majority English-speaking United States as a dominant superpower, instead of being discarded as a vestige of colonialism, myriad global Englishes have become “a seductive linguistic commodity with nativized ideological, linguistic, and functional reincarnations in [various foreign] contexts (Kachru 2005).” Narendra Modi, the 14th Prime Minister of India, is among the roughly one billion Non-Native Speakers (NNS) worldwide to acquire this lingua franca. The phonological variations within his speech demonstrate his own linguistic identity.
Modi, “grew up speaking Gujarati, [and] has taken great effort to master Hindi (Mishra 2014),” and therefore his English is susceptible to a dominant L1 and L2 transfer, as with many other Indian NNS. The phonological differences between English and Gujarati are numerous — compare the 24 consonants and 20 vowels of the former with the 32 consonants and 13 vowels of the latter. This discrepancy leads to drastically different phonotactics in their respective pronunciation patterns. Notably, whereas there are nine fricatives in English, there are only three in Gujarati. The nuance of certain fricatives in English may therefore be lost on a NNS. For example, “English fricative /ʒ/ is not the part of Gujarati phonology and it is generally replaced by /z/ (Joshi 2015),” despite the fact that /ʒ/ is postalveolar while /z/ is alveolar. While distinct consonants, /ʒ/ and /ʃ/ are both postalveolar fricatives with similar articulatory phonetics. For Modi, this replacement to /z/ is not limited to /ʒ/ but /ʃ/ as well. As such, affricates such as the one on the tail end of the nucleus of “partnership” (2:12, 4:22, 6:39), which in native dialects of English may sound like /pɑɹtnɚʃɪp/, are articulated by Modi as /pɑɹtnaːzeːp/.
Another distinct intonation trend that Modi makes in his speech — and shares with other Gujarati NNS — is the shift of “w to labial fricative (Weinberger 2015).” Both allophones in Hindi of the phoneme /ʋ/, [w] and [v] are used interchangeably in that language, with the pronunciation of the corresponding letter in the Devanagari alphabet (व) being one of the two, depending on sentential environment. This complementary distribution, while for this phoneme is natural in Hindi, results in a distinct and clearly non-native pronunciation when transferred to English. This is demonstrated clearly in Modi’s enunciation of ‘work’ (4:08), which is rendered as /vɜːk/. While retaining the labial obstruent persuasion of the phonemic transition, other instances of the /w/ phoneme demonstrate saliently the plosive sensibility of Gujarati NNS, whose native language has sixteen plosive phonemes, nearly three times that of English. Perhaps as a result, the words ‘wonderful’ (:31) and ‘world’ (2:06) are enunciated as /ˈbʌn.də(ɹ).fl̩/ and /ˈbɝld/. This change in phoneme doesn’t necessarily result in a shift in intelligibility, but it marks a NNS educated in Gujarati and Hindi.
Another pattern in the Prime Minister’s verbal communication is the disinclination to enunciate the postalveolar plosive /d/ at the end of simple past tense verbs. It has been well documented that “some Indian English speakers had a tendency to drop the -ed ending after [plosive consonants] (Baldridge 2002).” For Modi, this tendency is more robust, affecting nasal alveolar phonemes — for instance, ‘joined’ (4:11) is pronounced /ʤɔɪn/ — as well as postalveolar fricatives, with ‘emerged’ becoming /ɪˈmɜrz/ (recall the /ʒ/ to /z/ pattern discussed before). Finally, the plosive tendencies of Gujarati speakers are made evident once again with Modi’s pronunciation of ‘lived’ as /lɪb/ (:49). In short, while affecting vastly different types of phonemes in myriad ways, Modi is consistently susceptible to L1 (and L2) transfer when pronouncing, among other elements, ‘-ed’ verbs. This may be, in part, a result of a common tendency in Hindi and Gujarati to end simple past tense verbs with a vowel.
Modi’s English is quite masterful and intelligent, as one could reasonably expect from the leader of a formerly British-controlled polity in a world where English is increasingly ubiquitous. Certain shifts and omissions in his pronunciation reveal his own linguistic identity and history. This is exemplified most saliently in his replacement of postalveolar fricatives with /z/, the shift of /w/ to various labial obstruent consonants, and the lack of stress on the plosive /d/ on the tail end of past perfect verbs. These variants all contribute to his unique NNS English accent.
Works Cited
- Baldridge, J. (2002). Linguistic and Social Characteristics of Indian English. Language in India, Volume 2 (June-July).
- Joshi, P. (2015). Teaching Pronunciation to Gujarati Learners of English: Problems and Solutions. ELT Voice – India, Volume 5 (1), 12-18.
- Kachru, B. (2005). Asian Englishes: Beyond the Canon. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong.
- Mishra, M. (2014, June). Is Narendra Modi glocalizing India by speaking Hindi at international forums? Times of India. Retrieved from https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/mind-the-gap/is-narendra-modi-glocalizing-india-by-speaking-hindi-at-international-forums/
- Weinberger, Steven. (2015). Speech Accent Archive. George Mason University. Retrieved from http://accent.gmu.edu