So, I listen to several podcasts by people who are the children of Indian immigrants to the US, and I swear there's a very slight accent feature, where the K sound is closer to a G. So, e.g collection is closer to gollection, or company is toward "gompany." Is this a thing? Possibly it's actually a California accent, since most of them are in the Bay Area, but I don't think I've heard it elsewhere.
In general, is there a study of kids-of-immigrants' linguistic features?
I've wondered about this, even with regional things. I was born and raised in the Midwest, but my parents were both from the northern Rockies region.
I always thought that my grandparents pronounced things funny, so I clearly didn't have the same accent they did, but friends pointed out that my vowels sounded funny compared to everyone else's.
@ZachWeinersmith I'll second the NY/NJ/Jewish monkeywrench. My father grew up around San Francisco, adopted before he could speak by a woman from a french family who had arrived in 1850 and a Jewish man who had recently fled Germany (this was 1945). He (my father, SF native) has what some people clock as the hint of a NY accent.
🤷♂️
@ZachWeinersmith I don't know about second generation speakers generally, but Hindi and related languages distinguish between voiceless aspirated and unaspirated consonants. To speakers of languages, like English, that don't make such distinctions, an unaspirated , voiceless consonant sounds like a voiced consonant. That might explain a sound that’s between an English /g/ and /k/.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology#Consonants
@ZachWeinersmith Yes, this is a thing -- reduction of voice-onset-time, a phonetician would call it.
And there are tons of studies of immigrant community linguistic features! I know them mostly in the UK context, though.
Here's an early one: https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/20.500.12289/32/Lambert_ICPhS_1312_2007.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
(although it found no difference in voice-onset time between immigrant and control groups)
There have been more since then out of Jane Stuart-Smith's lab.
@ZachWeinersmith
[I am not a linguist, but...]
I believe it's the difference between aspirated (puff of air coming after the sound) and unaspirated. We do this in English, but only in some combinations - eg the difference in the "p" in "pot" vs "spot".
My understanding is that Proto-Indo-European distinguished between these sounds, but European languages don't anymore. I guess some Indian languages still do (or nobody would know the distinction ever existed).
In any case, I guess the Indian speakers you're hearing are using the unaspirated sound when you're used to hearing the aspirated sound. They're not saying "bot", they're saying "spot" without the '"s", and your brain never learned* to distinguish them.
[*or rather it forgot how to distinguish them, since I believe babies start off hearing more distinctions and then prune them back.]
Zach Weinersmith
Josh Carlson
{ id: d2718, ok: 🇵🇸🌈🏳️⚧️🇺🇦 }
SurfingTheEutectic
Anna Miriamsdochter
dbat 
Tim Henke (tɪm 'ɦɛŋ.kə)
trshash84
Кирилл 🌻🐝
Jon Hancock
Dan Getz
dasgrueneblatt
Ellipsis... 🇨🇦
Ergative Absolutive
Toby
Noah St. Amand
Michæl La💤