The numbers speak. 12. 5 crore Indians use English,
whereas only half as many in the UK do the same. When the USA invaded Iraq, I distrusted the American news
media and sought international coverage.
India’s English language newspaper websites provided some objectivity. One of them also delivered this: “Bush
Ploy Foxes Pundits.” I could put
the foxes in a bush, but I knew that “he pundits” is incorrect: pundit is a
noun. So, I reparsed the
sentence.
Totally Legend Like Anything: Indian English as a Global Standard
We think that our
vernacular is the standard, but Jews who speak Yiddish have an old joke: “What
is the difference between a language and dialect? Dialects do not have armies.” The so-called standard language is only the local dialect of
the capital city. See, for
example, The King's English by Henry
Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), which was published at the height of the British empire. But Rudyard Kipling was the first English language writer to
be honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907) and he was born in
Mumbai.
More than computers draw
Indians to the second-largest democracy on Earth. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams
(Sunita Pandya Krishna;) is the daughter of neuroanatomist Deepak Pandya. The
family moved from Euclid, Ohio (outside Cleveland) to Needham, Massachusetts,
where she passed out of high school. She did her graduation at the U.S. Naval
Academy and earned a master’s in engineering management at FIT, always a
popular school for those with a cantonment at the Cape. Williams holds the records for longest
space flight and most space walks by a woman. She served on ISS expeditions 14, 15, 32, and was the commander
of expedition 33. India’s first astronaut was Rakesh Sharma who served eight
days aboard the Salyut 7 space station in 1984. The Indian
Space Research Organization (ISRO) oversees five major centres. The launch site
is at Vikram Sarabhai Space Cente at Trivandrum. This year, the Indian
Institute of Science, Education and Research received government funding for a
new Centre of Excellence in Space Sciences in Kolkata. “Science and technical education is
mostly undertaken in English and, as a result, most university graduates in
these sectors are fairly proficient in English.” (See Wikipedia here.)
That Wikipedia article on
Indian English goes into grammar, phonology (consonants and vowels and spelling
pronunciations), and vocabulary and colloquialisms. British English still
exerts a historical influence and many idioms are common to both. However, American English is also
global, and you will find both “programme” and “program” in the same news presentation, especially online.
Curiously, perhaps, that
article inventories the word “flyover” (“as in BrE, overpass or an over-bridge
over a section of road or train tracks”).
However:
AUSTIN (KXAN) - The Texas
Transportation Commission has approved the funding of two new flyovers
connecting Mopac and US Highway 290.
Published : Thursday, 24
Sep 2009, 12:29 PM CDT.
When conversing, Americans
find Indians difficult to understand because the two varieties – not yet
dialects – stress syllables and words differently. Americans stress by time, emphasising only certain elements
to show importance. On the other
hand, Indian English is syllable-timed, as are Spanish and Italian, which is
why those languages sound rapid or sing-song to a North American ear.
If an election were held, America’s
huge English-speaking population would overwhelm all other candidates. But this is not a zero-sum game. As in the marketplace (rather than the
legislature or court), the nice thing about standards is that there are so many
to choose from.
Sudhir Nagaraj and his
wife, Bidisha, live in the mini-India that is Bangalore. She, a Bengali speaker
from a family hailing from India’s east, heads marketing for a social
networking start-up. He, fluent in the native Kannada tongue of Bangalore, runs
a subsidiary of a multinational telecommunications company. Between them, they
speak and understand half a dozen Indian languages.Quite ironic then that
their daughter, Ahana, six-and-a-half, growing up in a country with a profusion
of tongues, speaks only one language: impeccable English. And English is the
common tongue that binds the Nagarajs as a family. ... In the lower socioeconomic
strata, where learning English is aspirational, the language is trickling down
quickly. Neighborhood private schools have unstated admission requirements: at
3 and 4, the child is required to be toilet-trained and speak English. ... Rimjhim Chakraborty is 9.
Her mother, Pinky, a realtor, speaks Sindhi, a language from the northwest.
Rimjhim’s father, Apurba, who heads sourcing for a sporting goods
multinational, is fluent in both Punjabi and Bengali. Rimjhim, despite learning
Hindi at school, refuses to answer when spoken to in anything other than
English. So that is the language that rules the Chakraborty household. India Ink: Notes on the
the World's Largest Democracy India’s New ‘English Only’
Generation NY Times India Blog June 1, 2012, 7:18 am here.
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