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
English. It is, however, also a language that can be found in many important domains
such as in trades, in politics, in the media, etc3.
The purpose of this research is to present some of the various ways Indian people have
intentionally and unintentionally customized English to better suit their needs, and to
discuss some of the problems and situations which can arise when Indians use or
experience English in different settings; attitudes about English and English speakers in
India are also explored.
The research is divided into four chapters, in the first two I have tried to explore
respectively the English language in its global language role, and how and when it
penetrated in India. Chapter three deals with the differences between Indian and British
English at a different levels:
Phonological level:
I highlighted the differences between Indian and British English in vowels and
consonants. As out hired in chapter 3, Indian English vowels differ from British English
ones in a number of diphthongs: Indian English has six while British English has eight.
As for consonants, there are some distinctive and evident differences, such as, for
example, the alveolar stops sounds /d/, /t/ are usually retroflex [ɖ], [ʈ] and many
Indian speakers of English lack the voiced post alveolar fricative /ʒ/.which is
substituted by /z/ or /ʤ/.
Lexical level:
The Indian English lexicon has many distinct terms which are commonly used by its
speakers. In Indian English, in several blended expressions the elements are
interchangeable, and these expressions have become an integral part of the language in
Indian English, for example, Mazdoor Union “Labour Union”, Railway fatak “Railway
Crossing”.
Morphological level:
Indian English morphology is very creative and it is filled with new terminologies and
usages. Many Indian people when speaking English, pluralize English mass nouns and
3 Cf. http://www.languageinindia.com/may2003/annika.html
(last accessed on 14/07/2010)
2
end up with words such as litters, furnitures, and woods (Trudgill & Hannah, pp. 129-
130).
The last chapter illustrates some exemplification of the above differences in a corpus of
Indian English speakers. Initially I had some doubts about what kind of corpus I could
choose to explain what I had in mind among different options such as newspapers,
advertisement, or videos of Indian people talking in English retrievable from the
YouTube website. I finally settled for the latter option. I have thus selected some videos
of Indian English speakers coming from different regions of India in order to identify
characteristic features of Indian English..
3
CHAPTER 1 : THE SPREAD OF ENGLISH IN THE WORLD
1. English as a global language.
English has acquired during the twentieth century the status of an international language
as it was “in the right place at the right time” (Crystal 1997: 8). Generally, a language
achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a “special role” that is recognized in
every country (ivi: 2). English has become, across the planet, what Latin was in the
Middle Ages in the Mediterranean world. In a very short time English has conquered
the globe. It is the working language of the Asian trade group ASEAN; It is the de facto
working language of scientific research, it is the official language of the European
Central Bank, even though the bank is in Frankfurt and neither Britain nor any other
predominantly English-speaking country is a member of the European Monetary Union.
It is the language in which black parents in South Africa wish their children to be
educated4. It is the main language of books, newspapers, airports and air-traffic control,
international business and academic conferences, science, technology, medicine,
diplomacy, sports, international competitions, pop music and advertising. Over two-
thirds of the world scientists write in English (Crystal 1987: 358).
A statement like “English is the global language” seems so obvious to most people that
they would hardly give it a second thought. But, actually, what seems so obvious at first
sight it is not so obvious if we look at it carefully (Crystal 1997: 1).
The English language is spoken as a mother tongue by large numbers of people in many
countries, but not any language spoken by a large number of people acquires the label of
a global language: Spanish for example is not considered as such despite the fact that it
is spoken as a mother tongue in almost twenty countries around the world. According to
the U.S. Bureau of the Census, ten years ago about one in seven people in the U.S.A
spoke a language other than English at home and since then the proportion of Spanish
speaking immigrants in the population has grown significantly. Ever-wider swaths
areas of Florida, California, and the Southwest are heavily Spanish-speaking. Hispanic
people make up for 30 percent of the population of New York City, a television station
there that is affiliated with a Spanish-language network has been known to draw a larger
4 Cf. www.theatlantic.com/ past/docs/issues/2000/11/wallraff.htm (last accessed 20/02/2010 )
4
daily audience than at least one of the city's English-language network affiliates. Even
Sioux City, Iowa, now has a Spanish-language newspapers5.
Chinese, also, may have more native speakers than any other language though there is
significant language shift taking place within China from the main dialects towards
Mandarin (Putonghua). Mandarin is now enjoying popularity as a foreign language in
many Asian countries, in Europe and the USA; it is emerging as the new must-have
language: an estimated 30 million people are already studying Mandarin worldwide and
the Chinese government expects this to rise to around 100 million in the next few years
(Graddol 2006: 63)6. Nevertheless, it has not acquired the status of a global language.
Neither does a language become global because of its intrinsic structural proprieties, or
because of the size of its vocabulary, or because it has been a vehicle of a great
literature in the past. All these factors may encourage someone to learn the language,
but none on them can ensure a language world spread (Crystal 1997: 7).
What makes the difference in reaching a global status are power and economical factors.
The power of its people, whether political, military or economic, is a primary condition
for a language to make progress as an international medium of communication. The
status of English at the present day is the result of the expansion of British colonial
power in previous centuries, and of the emergence of the United States as the leading
economic power of the twentieth century; the latter is a major factor in the world
position of English language today. In 1780 John Adams presented his proposal to the
Congress for an American Academy stating that English was destined to be the
language of the world in the next centuries. The reason of his statement is obvious: the
increasing population in America, their universal connection and correlation with all
nations, aided by England, forced the English language into general use (ivi: 66)7.
The first significant step in the progress of English towards its status as a global
language took place at the end of the sixteenth century. At that time, the number of
mother tongue English people in the world was between 5 and 7 million, and almost all
of them were living in the British Isles.
Between end of the reign of Elizabeth I (1603) and the beginning of the reign of
Elizabeth II (1952), this figure increased almost fiftyfold, to some 250 million, with the
vast majority of speakers living outside the British Isles (ivi: 25). The first permanent
5 Cf. www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/11/wallraff.htm (last accessed 20/02/2010 )
6 Cf. www.britishcouncil.org/learning-research-english-next.pdf (last accessed 22/02/2010)
7 The USA has nearly 70 per cent of all English mother tongue speakers in the world (Crystal 1997: 53)
5
English settlement in United States is dated 1607, when an expedition arrived in
Chesapeake Bay. The colonist called their settlement Jamestown after James I. and the
area Virginia after the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth (ivi: 26). By the end of the nineteenth
century the USA were more populated than any western Europe country, approaching
about 100 million inhabitants, and its economy was the most productive and the fastest
growing in the world. British political imperialism “had launched” English around the
globe, and during the twentieth century, this world presence was maintained and
promoted through the economic supremacy of the American superpower; the language
of the US dollar was English (ivi: 8).
As Crystal (ivi: 24) underlines, two are the main answers to the question “why is
English the global language, and not some other?”
1) A Geographical- Historical account, which traces the movement of English
around the world throughout the voyages to the Americas, Asia, and the
Antipodes, an expansion that started in the seventeenth century and continued in
the nineteenth century with the colonial development in Africa and in the south
Pacific. This latter fact allowed, in the mid-twentieth century, to take a
significant further step in adopting English as a official or semi- official
language by many newly independent states, such as India, Singapore, Malawi,
Ghana, Kenya and many others countries. English is now represented in every
continent, and in all the islands of the three major oceans. It is this spread which
makes the label “global language” a reality. But English has not won the battle
to be the world‟s language only through a trail of imperial strength.
2) A Socio-Cultural explanation looks at the way people all over the world, in
many walks of life, have come to depend on English for their well-being. The
language has penetrated deeply into the international domains of political life,
the media, communication, business, education, entertainment and safety. The
convenience of having a lingua franca (a common language) available to serve
human relations and needs have come to be appreciated by millions. Several
domains, above all computer software industry, have come to be totally
dependent on it.
6
1.1 The spread of English
Thus, the spread of English is much more complex to be explained than just saying that
it is spoken as a mother tongue by large number of people in many countries. By any
standard, English is the native tongue of some 300.000 people – the largest speech
community in the world except for Mandarin Chinese. Even more remarkable is its
geographical spread, which it is second to none; English is also by far the most
important second language (ESL) in the world. It is spoken by millions of educated
Europeans, and serves as an official language in more than a dozen countries whose
population totals more than a thousand million; English is the lingua franca of
scientists, of air pilots and traffic controllers around the world, of students hitchhiking
around Europe (Claiborne 1983: 1-2).
Kachru (1992) represented the spread of English around the world in terms of three
distinct groups of users, those who speak English respectively as:
as a native language (ENL)
as a second language (ESL)
as a foreign language (EFL)
When we come to look more closely at this three-way categorisation and, particularly,
when we think about the most influential models and descriptions of use of English (see
below), we can notice that the above categories have become fuzzy at the edges and that
it is difficult to classify speakers of English as belonging completely to one of the three.
However, this three-way model offers a useful starting point from which to move on to
the present, more complicated situation.
Kachru‟s (1992: 356) model, has been the most influential in representing the spread of
English around the world. According to a three-way classification, Kachru represented
World Englishes into three concentric circles, the „Inner Circle‟, the „Outer Circle‟ and
the „Expanding Circle‟ which can explain how the language has been acquired and is
currently used in different ways in diverse cultural contexts. This categorisation refers
to how the language spread from Britain, in the first diaspora to the other English native
speakers countries (the Inner Circle), in the second diaspora to the English as a second
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