Features of Indian English: characteristics from a corpus of indian speakers

Introduction When we think about the English language in the present days we can affirm that it is the global language, due to many reasons: for example, the English language is spoken by more than 700 million people and it is nowadays the dominant or official language in over 60 countries. We can add further reasons saying that the English is the global medium is also employed to express local identities (Kachru1966: 11-14)1. Today there are more non-native than native users of English, but just a few centuries ago English was spoken by five to seven million people on one, relatively small island, and it consisted of dialects spoken by monolingual speakers (Jenkins 2003: 2). Many are thus the reasons for which the English language reached this global status. As Cristal underlines in his Stories of English (2008) “to tell the whole story of the English language is to tell many stories since every one of the hundred or more countries in which the English language now has a substantial presence has a particular story to tell” 2 . Indeed, the spread of English has inevitably led to diversification in the language, and raised many questions about the standardization of English. Standard native varieties, as “new Englishes”, have developed and are used their own contexts and usage. India, for example, represents the third largest English-using country in the world where the English language has penetrated greatly into society and developed its own varieties of English. The presence of English in India was the consequence of the efforts of English missionaries when the East India Company started trading in the early 1600s. Between 1780 and 1830, a large number of English schools were created in and around the metropolitan cities and this together with that of the Macaulay Minute of 1835 made the beginning of the process of producing English-speaking bilinguals in India possible (Schneider 2007: 164) and by the early twentieth century English had become both the official and academic language of India. Despite the nationalist movement in the 1920s which was formed to express anti-English feelings even though the nationalists were using English as their medium. The English language in India has developed its own distinctive features and it is very different from that of other English speaking countries, and it is regarded as being of a unique variety known as Indian 1 Cf. http://www.languageinindia.com/may2003/annika.html (last accessed on 14/07/2010) 2 Cf. http://www.confluence.org.uk/2008/12/02/the-english-project-and-the-english-language-in-india-christopher-mulvey/ (last accessed on 14/07/2010) 1