Indian English
Indian English refers to the variety of English spoken in India, influenced by the country's linguistic diversity and cultural heritage. It incorporates elements from various Indian languages, resulting in unique vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Indian English is widely used in media, literature, and everyday communication, reflecting the rich linguistic tapestry of the country.
8 Key excerpts on "Indian English"
eBook - ePub- Kersti Börjars, Kate Burridge(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Situated between these two polar extremes, there exists a range of varieties (or ‘mesolects’). Speakers have command of a number of these linguistic types and use depends on the situation and the audience. In the grammatical sketches we provide here, we will be drawing features from the mesolectal and basilectal varieties, since these are where the morphological and syntactic innovations are the most interesting. 11.2 New Englishes: Indian English English is now the official or co-official language in more than 75 countries; they include places with colonial associations with Britain or America, as well as those without these traditional links. In many cases, the varieties in these regions have such distinct grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and conventions of use that they are labelled ‘New Englishes.’ Examples include Singapore English, Malaysian English, Hong Kong English and Indian English. The rise of these new varieties has been a major motivation for the status of English as a global language. In some of these places we even are seeing English shifting from L2 and stabilising as L1. In Singapore, for example, the majority of children are now growing up speaking English as an L1 – so English as a second first language. The variety we focus on here is Indian English. English came into India as early as 1600 with the establishment of the East India Company. Here it encountered a range of Indic, Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burman languages, and this did much to shape the linguistic varieties that emerged. By the time India had gained its independence from Britain in 1947, English was firmly entrenched. Today it enjoys associate official status and continues to play an important role in government, the courts, higher education, the media and other public domains. Standard Indian English differs little in its core grammar from the mainstream standards. In the vernacular variety, however, differences are more striking and it’s these we focus on here...
- Eric Friginal, Jack A. Hardy, Eric Friginal, Jack A. Hardy(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...While today it is accepted as a variety that is both grammatically and lexically distinct, many early reports on Indian English focused exclusively on lexical characteristics of the variety. In fact, as Kachru (1986) explains, South Asian English is the only new variety of English for which there is a long and continuous tradition of lexicographical studies; very early dictionaries of Indianisms in Indian English date back to as early as 1886 with the Hobson-Jobson Dictionary. As Kachru explains, the main purpose of such dictionaries was to “provide linguistic entertainment by its lexical explanations” (1986, p. 41). It wasn’t until 2009, however, that Indian words in Indian English were studied in a systematic way, largely facilitated by advances in corpus linguistics methodology. First in 2009 (the corpus for the 2009 study was compiled in 2000, and is referred to as the 2000 corpus in this study) and then in 2016, Balasubramanian studied how different semantic categories of Indian words occurred across registers of spoken and written Indian English. Both earlier and later studies, however, agree that the occurrence of Indian words in Indian English is essentially register-dependent; Indian words occur in contexts where something typically Indian is being described. Indian words in Indian English have been studied mainly because of their stylistic implications. Many researchers (Verma, 1980; Dubey, 1991; Kachru, 1969; 1988) studied Indian words based on the assumption that they occur because native varieties of English like British English “proved to be ineffective in conveying aspects or messages from a culture alien to it” (Dubey, 1991, p. 21). Indian words in Indian English were regarded as lexical innovations “through which local, social, and cultural phenomena can find expression” (Baumgardner, 1996, p. 175)...
eBook - ePub- Andy Kirkpatrick(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...As the authors of these chapters point out, however, the role of English in each country has developed to a remarkable degree in the past decade or so, so that English is now more than simply a ‘foreign’ language in these countries.Chapter 9, ‘The development of the English language in India’ (Joybrato Mukherjee) describes the development of English in India using Schneider’s evolutionary model (itself the topic ofChapter 21). Mukherjee also provides examples of a selection of linguistic features of standard Indian English and discusses their causes or origins, arguing that many of the innovations have been caused, not by L1 interference, but by ‘nativized semantico-structural analogy’. For example, the new verb of Indian English ‘de-confirm’ is created by analogy from a verb like ‘destabilize’. The author concludes that Indian English can be classified as a semi-autonomous variety which has been extremely important in identity construction, especially in the field of creative writing. The subcontinent is also the topic ofChapter 10, ‘Sri Lankan Englishes’. The authors, Dushyanthi Mendis and Harshana Rambukwella, quote Meyler (2007: x–xi) to help outline the complexity of the Englishes of Sri Lanka:Even within a small country like Sri Lanka, and even within the relatively tiny English-speaking community, there are several sub-varieties of Sri Lankan English...
eBook - ePubLanguage, Society and Power
An Introduction
- Annabelle Mooney, Betsy Evans(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Leimgruber argues that CSE and Standard English in Singapore signal very different meanings. While Singlish is associated with localism, informality, closeness and community, standard English is linked to authority, formality, distance and educational attainment (2012: 56, following Alsagoff, 2007: 39). The different forms of these varieties are connected to very different functions. The distinction between these varieties is not only when they should be used but also what they communicate, over and above content. 10.6 Indian English According to the models presented in previous sections, Indian English is another outer circle variety which arose from a history of colonisation by the UK. While we have pointed out that some people in India use English as their L1, it is not the case that all people in India speak English. Sailaja notes that while few people report English as their ‘mother tongue’, over 64 million people use English (2009: 3). Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that there is a variety of English called ‘Indian English’, which bears traces of contact with other languages used in India, especially Hindi. Some of the syntactic and lexical features in Table 10.2 are found in Indian English (Sailaja, 2009, 2012). Table 10.2 Examples of Indian English Syntactic features ‘no’ as interrogative tag You will come, no? (Sailaja, 2009: 59) Wh- questions no inversion? When you will begin? (Sailaja, 2009: 57) Use of progressive tense I am having three books with me...
eBook - ePub- Robert Phillipson(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Take the example of ‘Indian English’, which has been adopted and stylized by one of the largest English-speaking nations in the world. English has been fused into Indian culture, taking on its values and expressions, borrowing and combining phrases from Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi (Coughlan, 2006). The fusion of the so-called Standard English and Indian cultures produces a distinct variety of English which reflects the identities and thought processes of Indians across the globe. True, at the platinum hub of call centres many employees are expected to imitate American English for the sake of their job. Everyday speaking still consists of expressions that are coloured by Indian culture, which itself is a fusion of different ideologies. English is not accepted whole, nor has it blanketed its recipients with Westernisation. Instead, the ‘collision of languages’ has generated expressions that lead to the ability of people to ‘shift seamlessly’ between Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and English (Coughlan, 2006), building a plethora of identities for themselves and diversifying the organization and expression of their experiences. References Bhatia, Aditi 2007. Discourse of illusion: a critical study of the discourses of terrorism. Ph.D., Macquarie University. Coughlan, Sean 2006. ‘It’s Hinglish, innit?’ BBC News Magazine, 8 Nov. Retrieved 2 Jan. 2006 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6122072.stm Phillipson, Robert 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ritzer, George 2004. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Comment 2 KINGSLEY BOLTON Stockholm University, [email protected] There is much to admire in Robert Phillipson’s article on English as lingua franca, not least the intoxicating sweep of the rhetoric, which is supported by a plethora of social and political facts and scholarly quotations from Theodore Roosevelt to John Pilger, from Kant to Umberto Eco, from Joseph Conrad to Bertrand Russell...
eBook - ePubTravelling Languages
Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World
- John O'Regan, Jane Wilkinson, Mike Robinson, John O'Regan, Jane Wilkinson, Mike Robinson(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Examining the current state of English in India, one finds that the motives of learners as well as the pedagogy, and even the language itself, have undergone significant changes reflective of the changing status of the language. Indians have recognised, as have others around the world, that ‘without English you are not even in the race’ (Graddol, 2006, p. 122). At the same time, the ‘function and place [of English] in the curriculum is no longer that of ‘‘foreign language’’ and this is bringing about profound changes in who is learning English, their motives for learning it and their needs as learners’ (Graddol, 2006, p. 72). The growing demand for English education in India has been accompanied by stress on indigenising of both curricula and pedagogy with far-reaching implications on the impact of the education. This is not unique to India, but a trend around the world. Mark Warkschauer points to the shift to a ‘communicative approach’ that has shaken the strong connection between language and culture by focusing on ‘functional interaction rather than on the achievement of nativelike perfection’ and that this trend corresponds to the imperatives of the contemporary world in which English is shared among many groups of nonnative speakers rather than dominated by the British or Americans (Warkschauer, 2000, p. 512). Thus, with English having acquired the position of a global lingua franca for international business, science, publishing, and computers, its older associations with literature and culture of a ‘superior’ race based on the use of the language as a tool for the Englishman’s civilising mission across the empire, seem to have been largely displaced by more pragmatic ones of acquiring a tool/skill and as an indicator of power, prestige, and success...
eBook - ePub- Harold Schiffman(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Diversity was preserved. An outside challenge to India's linguistic culture came with the arrival of Islam and the introduction of Persian as the ‘official’ language of the Mogul Empire. Needless to say, Persian may have claimed a domain in government, law and commerce in Mogul India, but it never displaced any other variety from its domains. It did have an effect on spoken Hindustani resulting in the development of a literary language written in Perso-Arabic script (Urdu), but again no exclusive domain was claimed by Urdu except perhaps eventually to replace Persian in the scheme of things. Even the arrival of European languages (chiefly Portuguese and then English) did not deeply disturb the equilibrium of Indian linguistic culture at first (English replaced Persian), and even after Macaulay's famous Minute and the development of English-style education, English was not thought of as displacing others, but as a variety that would allow the British better to govern India and bring it into the modern world. Most of the population of India was totally unaffected by English education, since they received no education at all, in any language. 14 Before Independence a kind of administrative and linguistic chaos, similar to the diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reigned all over India. Moslem rulers ruled over Hindus and Muslims; Hindu rajas ruled over Hindus and Muslims, and what languages they spoke was largely irrelevant (at this point there was neither cujus regio, ejus religio nor cujus regio, ejus lingua). It was not until the twentieth century that a large-scale linguistic census of India was undertaken (Grierson 1903– 28) and then only in the northern parts of British India. 15 Perhaps the greatest challenge to Indian linguistic culture originating from the impulse of English was that English education, English rule and English-imposed modernization created expectations that had not existed before, and created domains (e.g...
eBook - ePub- Robert D. King(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Austin Macauley Publishers(Publisher)
...Some of these, however, have been recently added for reasons that are more political than linguistic. I spent a good part of my traveling life in India, beginning with a summer of linguistic fieldwork in 1963. India broadened my perspective on many things: religion, the history of a once-colonial country, social structures such as caste, music, and much else. I was constantly alert to language friction. India was long a part of the British Empire, its ‘jewel in the crown.’ While the British were running the show, which they did in most of India from around 1757 down to 1947, English was the name of the language game. If you were Indian and wanted to ‘make it’ in British India, you had to know English, and know it well. Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the successful campaign to kick the British out of India, had a wicked flair for the English language, and his disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of free India, was erudite and fluent in English. He spoke English better than he did his home language, Hindi, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, spoke only English, not the Urdu which was the most common language of Indian Muslims and which Jinnah prescribed for Pakistan. All three men had been educated in England as was common for upper and upper-middle class Indians at the time (roughly from 1870 to 1930). Nehru attended the elite public school, Harrow, and subsequently Trinity College, Cambridge. When India gained its independence in 1947, there were two great language issues facing the country: the national language and linguistic states. The first of these was the question of what the national language of India should be, not an easy question to answer in a country with almost two-dozen major languages...
