Pleasure, Measure and Vision: Funny Indian pronunciation!

/ʒ/ (the sound of ‘s’ in pleasure, measure, leisure, vision etc) is another sound which is still beyond the reach of many of Indian speakers of English.

The speakers of Hindi and other north Indian languages use something like a ‘y’ in place of the sound /ʒ/. A good majority of them pronounce pleasure, measure, leisure and vision almost as ‘pleiyar’, ‘meiyar’, ‘leiyar’ and ‘viyyan’ .

What about the southern speakers? Their tongues can utter these words only as pleshur, meshur, leshur, vishen etc. The apparent absence of an equivalent to the original English sound /ʒ/ in any of the Indian languages is the culprit in this case as well.

The only way out for those who live in this country yet want to improve their pronunciation is to listen to good English, preferably spoken by native English speakers.