Effect of mother tongue influence

The worst part of mother tongue influence (MTI) is that it kills your confidence. You as a speaker know you sound wrong and even funny. It makes you self conscious and requires hard work for a long time to get over.

Just as each language has different words, letters and script – so does each have different sounds. Thus there are some sounds which are found in Hindi but not in English and some sounds may be found in English but not in Tamil.

For example: in the word “Pleasure”, the second syllable is a sound not found in Hindi. It’s not “plezar” and it’s not “pleshar” – it is the mix of sounds of “z” and “sh”. Thus, for native Hindi speakers with insufficient English speaking exposure, pronouncing pleasure (or measure or leisure) correctly takes time and practice.

Similarly, there are sounds in your regional language which may not exist in English.

When we begin speaking in the second language (i.e. English), we initially use sounds from our mother tongue. Thus, everyone has mother tongue influence (MTI) to begin with. With more and more listening to those fluent in the second language, practicing speaking yourself and correcting mistakes, you slowly learn to replace your mother tongue sounds with the original sounds of English.

Reasons behind MTI

This, in turn may happen due to one or more of the following reasons:

• You have not heard enough English
• You have not spoken enough English
• You have not been corrected enough

“Stop now!”, the smarter of you would say.

The Americans do speak English like Americans, the British like the British and Indians like the Indians. Aren’t these mother tongue influences?

Yes they are. Infact, accents are nothing but mother tongue influences so widespread that they become mainstream. http://www.firststepfirst.co.in Two characteristics distinguish accents from MTI (which essentially means “undesirable” mother tongue influence):

• Widespread adoption
• Uniformity

Thus, those regional, local or language influences which are adopted by so many people that the purists cannot ignore or isolate them become recognized as accents.

Is Indian neutral accent a solution to MTI?

We can’t do away with mother tongue influence completely. Infact, to ease our pain, certain Indian peculiarities of pronunciation have actually become acceptable and that’s what is neutral Indian accent.

For us Indians, the target should be to reduce our mother tongue influence so much that from a Punjabi/Bhojpuri/Tamil/Marathi or Bengali English speaker, we become an Indian English speaker. 

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