Vowel Analysis for Indian English

In the area of speech recognition accent plays a vital role. In this paper, we focus on the accent variations in Indian English with emphasis on the vowel analysis. Vowel analysis for Indian English is not performed extensively. In the present work, the formants of vowels for different accents are considered for comparison. We have considered four different accents of Indian English namely North Indian (NI), South Indian (SI), East Indian (EI) and West Indian (WI). The present investigation is performed using PRAAT tool with Indian English data set. Formant analyses have been carried out in two stages: (i) formant mean analysis, and (ii) the formant space analysis. Result from formant mean analysis shows that there is significant variation in accent from the first four formants (F1, F2, F3 and F4) individually. In addition, the formant space analysis depicts a gradual drift in different accent in the F1 vs. F2 formant space. Furthermore, we have plotted the triangle plot for better understanding the occurrence of vowel extremes in the accents. Results show that there exists a prominent difference in the accents of Indian English when formant features are considered.