I think both you and GP are correct, but in different ways. It's true that the English language has a very large number of phonemes... but accents tend to regu

I think both you and GP are correct, but in different ways. It's true that the English language has a very large number of phonemes... but accents tend to regularize/restrict these phonemes. For example, a typical bilingual speaker of Indian English and Hindi will replace instances of the /æ/ phoneme (as in "blast" or "fast") with another phoneme like /a:/ (as in "father"). Which isn't that unusual since /æ/ is pretty uncommon among languages. Other rare English phonemes include the dental fricatives, i.e. the "th" sounds in "ether" (voiceless) and "either" (voiced). Speakers of Indian English often replace this with a dental stop, a "t" sound (voiceless) or "d" sound (voiced). (Note that Devanagari has a _lot_ of stops, so this is one place where it cannot be cleanly encoded into the Latin alphabet without diacritics.) So overall: while I think Devanagari can't encode e.g. American English, it can actually do a pretty solid job of encoding Indian English, but not the other way around.