Can You Help Me Pronounce My Name?

I had expected my foreign accent might be problematic when I came from India to America to attend graduate school. I had, however, not thought I would even have a problem pronouncing my name. If there is anything I, and everyone else, can speak correctly and confidently, it is our name.

But communication is not just about the sender of a message. It is equally, and sometimes more, about the receiver of the message.

Pronunciation and accent, among several other factors, can create a communication gap between the sender and receiver. For instance, when I say my last name Tikoo, many Americans hear it as Dikoo.

In this post, I will offer some suggestions, based on my experience, about how Indians can manage their foreign accent in America.

Some people try to acquire an accent that they consider prestigious or mainstream. Accents should not be about prestige or fitting in, but for some, they are.

Your accent is part of your identity, and it is best to be comfortable with one’s identity.

If you must modify your accent, do it for functional, not aspirational, purposes.

Some Indian professionals in America modify their accent in the belief a foreign accent speedbumps career progression. This concern was relevant years ago; with the boom in cross-cultural work settings, global media, international travel, and multilingualism, the American workplace has become very accepting of foreign accents.

It is hard to lose an old accent and develop a new one, especially in post-teenage years, but that does not deter some Indians in America. They acquire an accent in a hurry, sometimes in a few months. Unfortunately, they focus on developing an American twang and not on fixing unintelligible pronunciation.

Intelligibility is the key criterion for assessing accent issues.  If the listener effortlessly understands you, there is no need to fix anything, regardless of how different your accent might be.

If there is an intelligibility problem, it is advisable to focus on improving the pronunciation element of the accent. Strive for the more easily attainable intelligible pronunciation and not native pronunciation.

Here are three aspects English speakers from India can address to manage the most significant accent-related issues they might face in America.

1) Speak Slowly

If you are a beginning driver on a busy and unfamiliar highway, it is easier to navigate the traffic by driving slowly.

Likewise, if you have a foreign accent, you can increase your comprehensibility to the audience by speaking slowly.

Record your speech in English and count the words per minute. If you speak over 130-140 words per minute, try to speak slowly.

2) Fix Five Problematic Sounds

With our first language, we unconsciously develop speech patterns involving the tongue, lips, and jaw. These speech patterns limit our ability to articulate certain sounds in other languages and lead to pronunciation imperfections.

Consider the words vest and west. Typically, Indian English speakers are not hesitant about saying these two words. They might be if they learned that they do not articulate V and W to produce different sounds.

The V and W sounds are distinct in English, but the distinction does not exist or is limited in Indian languages. Accordingly, outside of a context, a native American will be unsure whether an Indian speaker is saying vest or west.

When saying vest, the upper teeth graze the lower lip; when saying west, you pout the lips.  The two images below show the lips when articulating vest and west.

Besides the sounds that many Indians do not inherently articulate properly, there are some sounds that they can articulate, but they tend to muffle in their speech. For example, fluent-English speaking Indians often silence the R sound.

A fluent Indian English speaker will silence the R sound in Harvard and come across as saying, Howard, which is also a university, but of much lesser academic repute. If you were to introduce someone to an audience by saying she is a Harvard grad, and she heard you say Howard grad, you would make her cringe.

In addition to the two sounds highlighted above, Indian English speakers in America should work on differentiating between T and D, between S and J, and articulating the Th sound.

3) Stress the Right Syllable in a Word

Many Indians stress words on a different syllable (a unit of letters with a single vowel sound) than does the native speaker.

Take the word, photographer, for example. The syllables in this word are: pho•tog‘•ra•pher; the tog syllable is stressed when pronouncing the word.

Many Indians pronounce photographer as a combination of photo and grapher.

Indians who have not spoken English regularly find it difficult to say the word photographer in one mouthful compared to splitting it into two parts. In this instance, the listener can make out the word photographer is being said despite hearing a different pronunciation. For such types of words, it might not be worthwhile for some to expend the effort to develop the accepted pronunciation.

There are, however, some words, typically having two syllables, for which it is easy to correct the stress patterns. Consider the words such as produce, review, record, project, and compress that many Indian speakers tend to pronounce the same whether used as a noun or verb.

The pronunciation of these words varies depending on their use as nouns or verbs. In the word produce, you can stress pro to say Pro’•duce or stress duce to say Pro•duce’. Pro’duce (farmed products: fruits and vegetables) is a noun, and Produce’ (make) is a verb. This pattern holds for other such words.

The general rule is to stress the first syllable of the word for a noun and the second syllable for a verb.

What about Tikoo?

My mispronunciation of a T as a D is problematic only when there is no context. When I say Texas, the listener hears me say Texas even though I might have spoken T with a D sound; there is no miscommunication because the listener is familiar with the name Texas. However, because the listener is unfamiliar with Tikoo, I tend to be heard as having said Dikoo and not Tikoo.

I have since learned to say my last name as Tikoo. To bring out the T sound, the tip of the tongue should touch the bony ridge beneath the top front teeth.

Sometimes, I have to spell out my name orally. In such situations, I am extra careful and say T, as in Texas, I, K, O, O.

 

Notes

The difference between pronunciation and accent is somewhat slippery.

Pronunciation is how we articulate individual words, and accent is a pronunciation style of a particular language, specific to a region, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or some other population characteristic. Besides pronunciation, the overall pitch and how speakers raise and lower their voices contribute to an accent. For instance, I sense a distinctive melody when I hear Hindi with a Bihari accent or American English with a southern accent.

Everyone has an accent. We get singled out as having an accent if our accent differs from some standard accent. An accent that differs from a standard accent is neither good nor bad. It is just different. And that is perfectly fine. Some Indians speak English much better than many native American English speakers, but they speak with an accent.

The emergence of English as the world’s lingua franca means that non-native English speakers will increasingly face English language-related pronunciation issues.