Public Attitudes Toward Variety Indian English

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In India, English has been in use for more than four centuries. Its presence was established by traders of the East India Company so it was first the language of the early merchants, missioners and settlers. English became the official and academic language of India by the early twentieth century. The rising of the nationalist movement in the 1920's that attempted to introduce Hindi as the National language of India brought some anti-English sentiment, especially in the non-Hindi-speaking states, but they would even present their resistance primarily in English. It was decided then to temporarily maintain English for official purposes. Once independence was gained and the British were gone, English continued to be widely used, and in fact, the new constitution makers deliberated and wrote the Indian Constitution in the English language. The large group of English varieties that mainly evolved out from British English is called the Indian English. Indian English includes all former colonial areas like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. These varieties preserve several features of pronunciation, grammar, and semantics from the native languages of India; according to a research of the University of Stuttgart , there are “over 1 billion people and over 80 languages in India: 35% Hindi, 7% Bengali, 7% Marathi, 7% Telugu, 6% Tamil, 5% Gujarati, 5% Urdu, 4% Oriya, 3% Kannada, 3% Malayalam, 3% Punjabi, 1% Assamese, 1% Kashmiri etc.” In terms of phonology, there is a large regional variation within Indian English. The different areas of India have very distinct pronunciation patterns of the Indian English; in like manner, there are different regional accents of English in Britain. There are many cases of Indianisms when comparing I... ... middle of paper ... ... or modify their worldviews. Works Cited http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/other-shows/videos/thomas-l-friedman-reporting-accent-neutralization.htm http://www.waseda.jp/ocw/AsianStudies/9A-77WorldEnglishSpring2005/Assignments/08_India_TejKB/Indian%20English.pdf http://books.google.com.co/books?id=H8dtjSeWSigC&pg=PA285&lpg=PA285&dq=attitudes+from+RP+speakers+towards+indian+english&source=bl&ots=qQrva3ic3n&sig=yZtLmmkoEd1tI-mRwA3hyqUiWvE&hl=es-419&sa=X&ei=fH23UpzvLMXZkQen8YGICQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=attitudes%20from%20RP%20speakers%20towards%20indian%20english&f=false http://www.accu.or.jp/appreb/09/pdf33-2/33-2P005-007.pdf http://www.languageinindia.com/junjul2002/baldridgeindianenglish.html http://www.languageinindia.com/may2003/annika.html#chapter9 http://ifla.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/mitarbeiter/jilka/teaching/dialectology/d13_Safr_Ind.pdf

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