This study investigates acoustic properties of the monophthongal vowels of English as spoken by 20 Assamese speakers in North East India, based on their medium of education being English or Assamese. Research suggests that English in India may be converging to a more homogenous standard, at least among educated speakers, despite common first language (L1) differences (Maxwell & Fletcher, 2009; Sirsa & Redford, 2013; Wiltshire, 2020). Assamese, a member of the Indo-Aryan language family, shares phonological characteristics with surrounding languages from the Tibeto-Burman family. We find that the vowels of Assamese Indian English speakers maintain characteristics reflecting their L1, especially those similar to local Englishes spoken by L1 Tibeto-Burman speakers. However, English-medium educated speakers do more closely approximate the norms of the central Indian standard, suggesting that although North East Indian English norms diverge from those of central India, there is some convergence across India among English-medium educated speakers, regardless of L1s.

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阿萨姆印度英语使用者单音的声学特性

本研究根据印度东北部 20 名阿萨姆语使用者的教育媒介为英语或阿萨姆语，调查了他们所说的英语单元音的声学特性。研究表明，尽管第一语言 (L1) 存在共同差异，但印度的英语可能正在趋向于更加同质的标准，至少在受过教育的使用者中是如此（Maxwell & Fletcher，2009；Sirsa & Redford，2013；Wiltshire，2020）。阿萨姆语属于印度-雅利安语系，与周围的藏缅语系语言具有相同的语音特征。我们发现阿萨姆印度英语使用者的元音保留了反映其 L1 语言的特征，尤其是与 L1 藏缅语使用者所使用的当地英语相似的元音。然而，受过英语教育的人确实更接近印度中部标准的规范，这表明尽管东北印度的英语规范与印度中部的英语规范有所不同，但印度各地受英语教育的人之间存在一些趋同，无论 L1 是什么。