Tag: linguistics

English in India

Great quora post about the idiosyncrasies of English as spoken in India. When I first started working with an offshore Indian team, the phrase “please do the needful” confused the hell out of me. They also seem to use Mr. First Name a lot.

I remember looking it up at some point. There was a theory that this all stems from the time of East India Company. Apparently that’s how English was spoken at the time and after the British left, a lot of schools and textbooks remained the same. So while English evolved into the modern day version, a lot of Indians continue to learn and speak the version that was brought to them by the British a few centuries back.