If there is one phrase that, to me, defines Indian English, I think it would be "do the needful". For American English speakers, I think the first time you hear/see that, it is totally confusing and jarring in an odd way.
For some reason it means “I also” in Indian English and it sounds weird to non Indian dialect.
Like “Even I don’t understand this” sounds obnoxious to me because in my mind it means “Even I, an almighty being, don’t understand this, who are you to think you can understand it” but it means “I also don’t understand” in Indian English.
According to google “Even” as adverb: used to emphasize something surprising or extreme. So I assume what I think at first is what native English speakers also think.
I hear this daily and I know what it meant to mean now, I had a friend who did not know this and thought her Indian colleague was talking down to her.
For example: you are in a class and someone asked a question about a topic. The person next to you turns and says "I can't believe they don't understand this topic." Your neighbor is making the assumption that you also understand it. So if you didn't understand the topic, a response could be "Nah, even I had some questions about it."
Although someone could definitely use it to be condescending, or just trying to be cheeky.
It comes from mid-19th century British English, which was used to design templates for formal letter writing in India.
These artifacts have remained as part of Indian English, but died as part of British and American English.
[1] https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/09/doing-needful.h...
I thought the British gave that phrase during colonial times.
And in a sense, yes, I was intending to over-generalize a bit, I think that for various languages that used broadly in different geographies, certain words and phrases tend to pop up locally that are often not widely used outside of that region. This is just from observations I have made traveling globally and working with global teams for 20+ years. I mentioned "do the needful" as it popped into my head from the parent comment about Indian English.
The one that sticks in my mind is "club" as a verb meaning "group". "We will club these events together into one message for efficiency".
I hope it goes mainstream some day, at least in tech.
I'm South Asian by the way, so this meme is also associated with my own culture.
Having said that, one of the things that you have to learn when you start speaking with English speakers from around the world is to recognise which of the words in your vocabulary will be understood vs which are particular to your native country. I'd put words like "prepone" and "needful" into this category: you need to find an alternative when talking to people from places where those words aren't understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
A huge number of kids in India learn English as their first and only language. Especially kids born in cities, whose parents' linguistic backgrounds differ.
> it'll never sound as natural
It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here.
> It's not the language of the street or the discourse.
Wrong. India is not homogeneous like that. In Bangalore, an Indian walking into a shoe shop on Brigade Road will get addressed by the shopkeeper in English. Or an Indian visiting a pub in Koramangala, also gets addressed by the waiter in English. The consumption numbers of English news channels, English newspapers, etc. should give you an idea of the prevalence of English here.
"The 2011 Census showed English is the primary language—mother tongue—of 256,000 people, the second language of 83 million people, and the third language of another 46 million people, making it the second-most widely spoken language after Hindi"
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-e...
256K is not a huge amount. Even if that's up to 1.256 million in the last 10 years, that's nothing compared to the size of India.
>It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here
It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent. This could also possibly be explained by the complete lack of English language Indian media outside of India, in the US particularly. We get UK, Canadian, and sometimes even Australian and NZ programming in the US. Why no Indian?
>Wrong. India is not homogeneous like that. In Bangalore, an Indian walking into a shoe shop on Brigade Road will get addressed by the shopkeeper in English. Or an Indian visiting a pub in Koramangala, also gets addressed by the waiter in English.
I'm well aware. However, when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not. English is a lingua franca, not the preferred option if there's a shared mother tongue.
That's no different than the US.
> It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My point was: who decides, and on what basis? There was a time when Australians did not consider their accent acceptable on their own news channels. They adopted RP [2]. Would you consider John Bishop's scouse accent [3] unnatural? How about all the other accents of UK, like Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc.?
> Why no Indian?
No idea. The vagaries of business decisions and culture. Most Indian programs are terrible, IMO. Many of my female cousins watch Korean soap operas. Among my younger cousins, anime is the norm. All with subtitles.
> when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not.
To the contrary, it would depend on the locality of the cafe, the topic of the conversation, their interpersonal dynamics, and so on. My school required us to speak just English on the premises, and would scold us if we used Kannada. Fining kids [4] is pretty common too. It eventually leads to school kids using English with each other after school too. In a city like Raichur or Kolar, the odds of Kannada being the default language are good. In Bangalore, while I think I can predict the language, my prediction would depend on a lot of local factors.
[1] https://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnP_C6RSdJU
I and a lot of my Indian peers consider English to be our 1st language.
For example: "Good morning, Bob...!!!"
I would really like to know where it comes from. In my experience, they don't realize that "..." comes across as dramatic or passive-aggressive. The "!!!" part I assume is just meant to convey enthusiasm, but it comes across as very aggressive.
As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that weird that the teacher in the article used it.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone