Indian English is not only a perfectly good dialect, it's one of the most popular worldwide. It doesn't have the prestige of the King's English, but I'd personally prefer it to some of the other colonies'.
>Indian English is not only a perfectly good dialect, it's one of the most popular worldwide.
Sure, but a lot of times it's not really Indian English, it's English vocab mixed and matched with grammar rules from other Indian languages like Hindi or Urdu or Bengali. I've been on conference calls where Indians from different regions were speaking mutually unintelligible versions of English and had to act as a translator from english to english.
I feel like ‘actual English’ comes off as unnecessarily mean here. There is no ‘actual English’ there are just different regional and cultural variations.
You may personally like one or another better, you may find some particular varieties easier or harder to understand, but that doesn’t make those people any more or less ‘actual’ English speakers than you are. They are ‘actually’ speaking English, just like you.
If you wanted to phrase this in a less fraught way, you might say “Yea but you can almost always tell it’s an Indian because they tend to write characteristically distinct from <your nationality> English speakers” -
and I would agree with you, sentence structure and idioms do usually make it pretty easy to recognize.
Actual English is when you speak in the spirit of the language, not just the grammatical and syntactical structures. It should be free of speech patterns from other languages and more assimilated.
I think people are downing this because it comes off as if don't have an appreciation for different dialects, but you're making a key point. There are a lot of people that 'speak english' by using english vocab with their native tongue's grammar and that is different (and less intelligible) than speaking a recognized dialect.
"The spirit of the language" is just a restatement of your original assertion about "actual English", based on what seems an assumed authority to make such a claim.
I've been keeping a file of samples of unusually poor English I encounter in technical programming forums etc. It's almost entirely from people with Indian names. Over decades of experience I've come to notice patterns in how certain native languages inform specific common errors (for a trivial example, native German speakers typo "und" for "and" all the time, even if they have many years of experience with English and are otherwise fluent).
But many of the samples I've seen from Indians (I don't know what their native languages are exactly, and fully admit I wouldn't be able to tell them apart) in the last few years are quite frankly on a whole other level. They're barely intelligible at all. I'm not talking about the use of dialectic idioms like "do the needful" or using "doubt" where UK or US English speakers would use "question". All of that is fine, and frankly not difficult to get used to.
I'm talking about more or less complete word salad, where the only meaning I can extract at all is that something is believed to have gone wrong and the OP is desperate for help. It comes across that they would like to ask a question, but have no concept of QUASM (see e.g. https://www.espressoenglish.net/an-easy-way-to-form-almost-a...) whatsoever.
I have also seen countless cases where someone posted obvious AI output in English, while having established history in the same community of demonstrating barely any understanding of the language; been told that this is unacceptable; and then appeared entirely unable to understand how anyone else could tell that this was happening. But I struggle to recall any instance where the username suggested any culture other than an Indian one (and in those cases it was an Arabic name).
To be clear, I am not saying that this is anything about the people or the culture. It's simple availability bias. Although China has a comparable population, there's a pretty high bar to entry for any Chinese nationals who want to participate in English-speaking technical forums, for hopefully obvious reasons. But thanks to the status of an English dialect as an official language, H1B programs etc., and now the ability to "polish" (heavy irony) one's writing with an LLM, and of course the raw numbers, the demographics have shifted dramatically in the last several years.
My observations largely match your own, and also applies more generally to non-technical interactions online. I help manage a group that runs a local LAN, and have run into both the general language issues, and people making long, incomprehensible requests that have major LLM smells.
I don't think it's just availability bias however, I think it's mostly a case of divergent linguistic evolution. In terms of the amount of people who speak English at an A level, India has the largest English speaking population in the world. With that, and a host of other native languages, came a rapid divergence from British English as various speech patterns, idioms, etc, are subsumed, merged, selectively rejected, and so on.
The main reason you don't see divergence to the same extent in other former colonies, even older colonies like Canada and the US, is that the vast majority of the colonists spoke English as a primary language.
"Actually Indians" was coined to refer to "AI" products which turn out to be outsourced human labor in disguise. Builder.ai was the most infamous example.
The idea that Builder.ai was Indian workers being sold as AI wasn’t true, by the way. That was made up by a crypto influencer on twitter and copied by sloppy news sites. They were a consulting firm that also sold an AI product, with the two clearly separated.
French is one of Canada’s. It’s generally spoken poorly in Vancouver.
Yea but you can always tell it’s an Indian because they write differently from actual English speakers.
Indian English is not only a perfectly good dialect, it's one of the most popular worldwide. It doesn't have the prestige of the King's English, but I'd personally prefer it to some of the other colonies'.
>Indian English is not only a perfectly good dialect, it's one of the most popular worldwide.
Sure, but a lot of times it's not really Indian English, it's English vocab mixed and matched with grammar rules from other Indian languages like Hindi or Urdu or Bengali. I've been on conference calls where Indians from different regions were speaking mutually unintelligible versions of English and had to act as a translator from english to english.
A dialect is not good just because it is popular.
Does it matter? We are here on American site anyway - not English.
You dropped your conjunction.
I feel like ‘actual English’ comes off as unnecessarily mean here. There is no ‘actual English’ there are just different regional and cultural variations.
You may personally like one or another better, you may find some particular varieties easier or harder to understand, but that doesn’t make those people any more or less ‘actual’ English speakers than you are. They are ‘actually’ speaking English, just like you.
If you wanted to phrase this in a less fraught way, you might say “Yea but you can almost always tell it’s an Indian because they tend to write characteristically distinct from <your nationality> English speakers” -
and I would agree with you, sentence structure and idioms do usually make it pretty easy to recognize.
Actual English is when you speak in the spirit of the language, not just the grammatical and syntactical structures. It should be free of speech patterns from other languages and more assimilated.
I think people are downing this because it comes off as if don't have an appreciation for different dialects, but you're making a key point. There are a lot of people that 'speak english' by using english vocab with their native tongue's grammar and that is different (and less intelligible) than speaking a recognized dialect.
"The spirit of the language" is just a restatement of your original assertion about "actual English", based on what seems an assumed authority to make such a claim.
English isn't French, there isn't an 'official version'
> Yea but you can always tell it’s an Indian because they write differently from actual English speakers.
to what end do you employ this analysis?
I've been keeping a file of samples of unusually poor English I encounter in technical programming forums etc. It's almost entirely from people with Indian names. Over decades of experience I've come to notice patterns in how certain native languages inform specific common errors (for a trivial example, native German speakers typo "und" for "and" all the time, even if they have many years of experience with English and are otherwise fluent).
But many of the samples I've seen from Indians (I don't know what their native languages are exactly, and fully admit I wouldn't be able to tell them apart) in the last few years are quite frankly on a whole other level. They're barely intelligible at all. I'm not talking about the use of dialectic idioms like "do the needful" or using "doubt" where UK or US English speakers would use "question". All of that is fine, and frankly not difficult to get used to.
I'm talking about more or less complete word salad, where the only meaning I can extract at all is that something is believed to have gone wrong and the OP is desperate for help. It comes across that they would like to ask a question, but have no concept of QUASM (see e.g. https://www.espressoenglish.net/an-easy-way-to-form-almost-a...) whatsoever.
I have also seen countless cases where someone posted obvious AI output in English, while having established history in the same community of demonstrating barely any understanding of the language; been told that this is unacceptable; and then appeared entirely unable to understand how anyone else could tell that this was happening. But I struggle to recall any instance where the username suggested any culture other than an Indian one (and in those cases it was an Arabic name).
To be clear, I am not saying that this is anything about the people or the culture. It's simple availability bias. Although China has a comparable population, there's a pretty high bar to entry for any Chinese nationals who want to participate in English-speaking technical forums, for hopefully obvious reasons. But thanks to the status of an English dialect as an official language, H1B programs etc., and now the ability to "polish" (heavy irony) one's writing with an LLM, and of course the raw numbers, the demographics have shifted dramatically in the last several years.
My observations largely match your own, and also applies more generally to non-technical interactions online. I help manage a group that runs a local LAN, and have run into both the general language issues, and people making long, incomprehensible requests that have major LLM smells.
I don't think it's just availability bias however, I think it's mostly a case of divergent linguistic evolution. In terms of the amount of people who speak English at an A level, India has the largest English speaking population in the world. With that, and a host of other native languages, came a rapid divergence from British English as various speech patterns, idioms, etc, are subsumed, merged, selectively rejected, and so on.
The main reason you don't see divergence to the same extent in other former colonies, even older colonies like Canada and the US, is that the vast majority of the colonists spoke English as a primary language.
what are they even reffering to, what does AI stand for in relation to India?
"Actually Indians" was coined to refer to "AI" products which turn out to be outsourced human labor in disguise. Builder.ai was the most infamous example.
Not the biggest example; Amazon pulled the same trick.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/10/amazon...
The idea that Builder.ai was Indian workers being sold as AI wasn’t true, by the way. That was made up by a crypto influencer on twitter and copied by sloppy news sites. They were a consulting firm that also sold an AI product, with the two clearly separated.
It's amazing to me that the human-labour-in-disguise thing was first reported in 2019, but the company only went bankrupt in 2025.
The PowerPoints that sold investors on the company were written and discussed by humans.