The preliminary findings of an acoustic phonetic analysis of the vowels produced by speakers of English as a second language from North India are presented in this paper. Citation-form monophthong productions of a group of male NIE speakers were recorded and acoustically analysed. Results confirm a number of earlier impressionistic studies including the lack of a quality distinction between many tense/lax vowel pairs. North Indian English also appears to illustrate some vowel patterns that suggest it may be a separate subvariety of IE.