I'm not sure 1.3B Indians can justify giving Indian English priority when only 125M of them speak English with just 9.5M with it as their first language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

Very good point. (My sample of indian english speakers has obviously been a biased one!) In that case, I'd expect the poor english to continue to see everyone else appropriate their language, and the strength of dialects to range as:

    en-us  native
    en-eu  creole
    en-gb  native

(Is there an opportunity to form a contact language between cmn's 1,1 billion and en's 1,3 billion? Guess we should ask en-sg speakers, lah)

As a Brit I have my own opinions on what should be considered “poor English”. Perhaps the default should be International English. Not MS International English but that subset they teach as EOFL and that you find spoken in large international companies.

There is no English creole forming in Europe. Textbook English in schools and then hardly spoken outside some corporate environments. I would rather classify workplace English as just bad English.

I guess you need a more wide and natural speaking of bad English for a creole to form when people try to over-bridge their bad English with own inventions?

Workplace english is only bad english when there is poor communication. I've been happy with my results of using business english in many EU countries (the underlying transactions having had little to do with central standards of either orthography or grammar), and as far as I can tell, the only people who judge "good" or "poor" english as more important than good communication are those anglophones who view themselves as "middle class."

That said, agreed that there's probably more progress necessary for a true creole. (What language do people normally speak on vacation? Many of tourists who come here try english if they're not entirely comfortable in a local language.)

I rate myself as speaking OK English and have worked alot speaking english to non native english speakers but I still feel any non trivial discussion in English are about half as effective and much more exhausting. I will probably never get used to it.

I admit I was only thinking about reading and writing[1], but I know what you mean about exhausting. That does slowly go away with use.

Speaking comfort (judging by my circle) generally takes a couple of years of immersion. Now that we have large quantities of video online[2] in the popular languages, listening comprehension should be far easier to come by, but speaking is always the difficult part.

The two best ways I've found to learn to speak are (a) trying to get some real world task done, and (b) drunken pub convos. Note that in both these cases perfection is secondary to communication.

[1] Dijkstra ("EWD") had a better written english than many native speakers.

[2] In countries where I'm amazed at the local command of english, it's often because their TV ran english programs undubbed.

The onboarding at my company (in the US) had a whole segment on some of the diffefences in Indian English. It definitely comes up a lot everywhere I've worked. Probably almost everyone who works in tech has some exposure at this point.

How many of those 1.3billion do actually speak English? How many more outside of US and UK speak English?

Can you clarify what subcontinental Indian English will supposedly do to en-us?

Presumably displace as a default global assumption. Don’t see it happening myself - it will follow economic power, not population.

India is naturally poised to displace the US and become the second world power behind China, so I definitely see it happening.