Monday, July 14, 2003		Feature

Roll your Ls and keep T well pronounced
Anuradha Varma

RUBY Anderson is hard at work with her clients. Her colleagues are similarly engaged on the phone, speaking with decidedly American twangs and dressed in "hyper" casuals — T-shirts, bandannas, with some even flaunting tattoos on their arms. A scene from New York? Nah! It’s New Delhi.

Ruby Anderson is actually Jahnavi Bora from Assam, one of the thousands of executives employed in call centres in cities ranging from Gurgaon, New Delhi and Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai.

Every night she deals with the queries of customers, pensioners, airline passengers, bank account holders and a host of others— all of who are in the US or Britain.

Most of her clients do not realise they are speaking with an Assamese girl in New Delhi, thanks to the "training" Bora has been through.

One that has given her "neutral" accent that few can place. Although she has not set her foot outside India, Bora is somewhat of an authority on the way English is spoken in the USA and in Britain.

"British English is spoken with a neutral accent, similar to the Indian one and in American English, the ‘T’ is not audible — ‘interview’ becomes ‘inner-view,’" she says. Dealing with clients has also given her an idea about their attitudes. "People in the USA are informal and you can call them any time, while in Britain, it is rude to call during tea and dinner time," she says. She is currently selling mortgages to customers in the USA, Bora says, letting the word slip out as "morrgages".

A neutral accent, according to Ashish Gupta, CEO from a call centre training institute, is one that removes "regional biases". And India’s English-speaking youth seemingly have little difficulty in adapting to such an accent.

Other trainers too follow a somewhat similar route to get the accent right. Different kinds of software, some available off the Net and others that are imported, can help get the diction and accent right.

Some of them read out a paragraph in a particular accent after you type it out. In others, you can rate your performance after a comparison of accents.

Vikram Badhwar, who gives voice training at Peach Communications, believes if the steps to acquire a desired accent are taught well, it is possible to do an easy switchover. He trains about four to five groups in a month, with not over 15 in a group.

As Badhwar puts it: "It is just about rolling your Rs and your Ls, keeping the T well pronounced if it is in the beginning and barely pronounced if in the middle, the ‘aw’ sound becoming ‘ah’, and the ‘ah’ ‘ai!’"