I am happy that our group chose the topic that we chose and I am also happy about the topic I got to research, because I ended up becoming very interested in it. I learned about some phonetic rules that I always knew existed but never really thought of them as rules nor did I ever stop to think that they were much of anything at all. Once I started studying these rules more closely I started thinking about them in the contexts of other languages as well and I discovered I am actually quite interested in phonology While studying the retroflex 'r' consonant I became curious whether this was related to the more 'rolling' 'r' sounds I have heard in other languages like Spanish and Scottish, and learned that those are 'trills', different in the fact that they actually create a vibration when you speak them. Then I got to thinking about Spanish again and how they use both retroflex consonants and trills, depending on how many 'r's are in the word (pero vs. perro). I am a big fan of these 'r' sounds, probably because I can't really do them myself and they are foreign to our standard English, which I think is unfortunate.
Back to the topic of Indian English, I really enjoyed studying these dialects because I think it sounds beautiful and rich and I love the humor and excitement they infuse into their vocabulary. I have read several Indian English novels, some by Indian authors and some by British authors, and have always wanted to study they way they speak more closely.
I love Indian literature too, and there is in so much of it a rich sense of linguistic play and innovation. I love the trilled r too - it's a feature of Indonesian, and I got pretty good at it by the end of year, better than my language teacher, who told me she got made fun of as a child because she couldn't do it well enough.
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