Study of Indian English Pronunciation Variabilities relative to Received Pronunciation
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In contrast to British or American English, labeled pronunciation data on the phonetic level is scarce for Indian English (IE). This has made it challenging to study pronunciations of Indian English. Moreover, IE has many varieties, resulting from various native language influences on L2 English. Indian English has been studied in the past, by a few linguistic works. They report phonetic rules for such characterisation, however, the extent to which they can be applied to a diverse large-scale Indian pronunciation data remains under-examined. We consider a corpus, IndicTIMIT, which is rich in the diversity of IE varieties and is curated in a nativity balanced manner. It contains data from 80 speakers corresponding to various regions of India. We present an approach to validate the phonetic rules of IE along with reporting unexplored rules derived using a data-driven manner, on this corpus. We also provide quantitative information regarding which rules are more prominently observed than the others, attributing to their relevance in IE accordingly.
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