  Speech systems are sensitive to accent variations. This is especially
challenging in the Indian context, with an abundance of languages but a dearth
of linguistic studies characterising pronunciation variations. The growing
number of L2 English speakers in India reinforces the need to study accents and
L1-L2 interactions. We investigate the accents of Indian English (IE) speakers
and report in detail our observations, both specific and common to all regions.
In particular, we observe the phonemic variations and phonotactics occurring in
the speakers' native languages and apply this to their English pronunciations.
We demonstrate the influence of 18 Indian languages on IE by comparing the
native language pronunciations with IE pronunciations obtained jointly from
existing literature studies and phonetically annotated speech of 80 speakers.
Consequently, we are able to validate the intuitions of Indian language
influences on IE pronunciations by justifying pronunciation rules from the
perspective of Indian language phonology. We obtain a comprehensive description
in terms of universal and region-specific characteristics of IE, which
facilitates accent conversion and adaptation of existing ASR and TTS systems to
different Indian accents.
