Indian English

From BBC:
"Why India has a touchy relationship with English"

Recent street protests over a test aspiring bureaucrats must take shines a light on India's touchy relationship with English, writes Atish Patel. Later this week, a rigorous annual process to select 1,000-odd people to join the upper echelons of India's civil services will begin. Some 250,000 aspirants - many of whom have spent years preparing - will write a test made up of two papers that will quiz them on a wide variety of topics. But just 5% of those who turn up on Sunday for the preliminary exam will qualify for the next stage - a much more taxing main examination in December. As normal, Sunday's test will be in English and Hindi, with one of the two papers, known as the Civil Services Aptitude Test, or CSAT, including a section to test English proficiency. But unlike previous years, test takers this time will leave this part - printed only in English - unanswered.

That's because after hundreds of candidates protested on the streets of Delhi in recent weeks, complaining the paper discriminated against those schooled in Hindi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government decided the section's marks would not count. Protesters say since CSAT was introduced in 2011, fewer Hindi-language applicants are succeeding.  They claim that of the 1,122 selected to join the civil services out of those who took the fiercely competitive exam last year, only 2.3% came from non-English schools, a drop from 25% in 2009. The debate comes at a time when Narendra Modi has stated his preference for using Hindi, including on trips abroad, despite a decent grasp of English, since becoming India's prime minister in May. For many in his Hindu nationalist party, it's the same. His administration also told officials to use Hindi on social media and in government letters. But after some southern states complained, it clarified the order only applied to northern states where the language is widely spoken.  In the past, the question of whether Hindi should get primacy in India - a highly diverse country with 22 official tongues - has been deeply divisive.  In the 1960s, for example, the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where Tamil is the major language, witnessed deadly anti-Hindi protests. Those against the top-down push for Hindi point out that very often it's not Hindi - spoken by 40% of the country's 1.24 billion population - but English which is used as the language for Indians from different states to communicate with one another. And this applies to civil servants too.


^ First, India has 22 official languages and so making Hindi the main language of the country only discriminates against all the other languages and the people who speak them. Second, making English the language of "inter-ethnic communication" like most of the former Soviet Republics have done with Russian would help to unify the different language groups in India because English has become the sole International Language (not because of British colonialism, but American influences.) Third, Indian English is very hard for a native English speaker to understand. The Indians should focus on improving their dialect/accent so that they can become more apart of the international community instead of only focusing on tech support (where everyone's name is "John".) The debate shouldn't be whether to use English or not, but to make more Indians fluent in the language to the point that a native speaker could understand them. ^


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-28863100