INDIAN English Explained to a LONDONER

Today on LetThemTalkTV. We're going to look at Indian English, a dialect of English, spoken

by 265 million people across India and that's more than the whole of Britain.

We are going to look at the pronunciation, the vocabulary, the grammar.

And to guide me on this linguistic rickshaw, I have our pundit all the way from India.

Ajay Namaskar. Namaskar, Gideon First of all.

Ajay Who are you and where are you from? Fantastic. Thanks for that, Gideon.

I'm Ajay and I'm from the small city of Solapur in Maharashtra. I currently work in software sales that are global clients

for a company called profit.co What languages do you speak? That's a very interesting question because I speak four languages.

Two of them are Indian, one's Marathi and Hindi. I also speak English and German as the European languages.

We won't really get into German today, but it's nice that you speak it. So can you say a little bit more about

the languages of India? Marathi That's... Is it similar to Hindi?

There are hundreds of languages in India and about 22 of the major languages have been recognized in the Indian constitution.

Marathi is one of them. It is similar to Hindi, but the language is relatively different.

The writing is different. Also, the translations are quite different. But yeah, they derive from the same same parent language.

Is English sort of a language of communication

across India or is it Hindi or how does that work? In India Hindi is the primary language that is commonly used for communication

across most parts of India, except in southern India. You would find people fluently speaking English as the parent language

to communicate, but overall, if you look at the professional community in India, English is again a very common language to communicate.

I've got some statistics about Indian English and they're a bit confusing and contradictory because one statistic I found said

265 million people speak English and another one says under 129, million people speak English, whichever it is it's a lot of people.

But in your experience, what kind of percentage going

around of people are fluent in English on the streets of your town?

Will they know English or is it just like the educated, highly educated people?

I think in India, about 25% of population can communicate in English.

I wouldn't call them fluent, but about one in four people would be able to communicate with you in English really well.

So from that statistical standpoint, I would say it's on the higher end. And you learn English at school.

So most schools in India today offer English as the second language, and most schools have three languages that are taught to kids.

Second language is English and so on to subjects like mathematics and science are offered in English.

In most of the schools in India. We are going to look at pronunciation, some grammar, some expressions. It's

interesting. Let's start with pronunciation. There are many Indian Englishes, aren't there?

Yes, absolutely. All the languages have variations, is that correct? Yes.

So Marathi, they may speak one form of Indian English and it's different.

I would say the mother tongue of a person, which is one of the many Indian languages, has a vast impact on what kind of Indian English is spoken

by each person. Okay. All right. Okay. Well, we'll look at that, right? We can look at the O sounds, the big round

O sound as in Don't, don't, don't.

Yeah, don't do it here. The D is very different. We'll come to that later. So the sentence I have.

Don't go to the show. It's closed. Don't go to the show.

It's closed. Don't go to the show. It's closed. Sorry for my poor pronunciation

that's what I'm trying to learn from you. Next one is the OR sound