Everyone, it seems, has some funny story about struggling to communicate with a call center or tech support specialist based in India. Joking aside, however, the "eccentricities" of English as it's commonly written and spoken in India can impede business growth and result in missed opportunities for Indian businesses competing in a global marketplace.
India is now home to numerous multinational corporations, and has become a hub for a wide range of outsourcing activities including medical transcription, paralegal work, financial report writing and much more. With so much riding on outsourcing and other efforts to "woo the West," why is it that Indian English continues to get in the way?
To gain some insight into how and why English has developed in India, we spoke with Jyoti Sanyal, late author of Indlish – The Book for Every English-Speaking Indian. A long-time Assistant Editor at The Statesman – one of India’s oldest English-language newspapers – Sanyal was an an ardent supporter of the Plain English movement, and a founder of Clear English India. Find out who's to blame for that odd amalgam of British English, Hindi influences, colorful local idioms, and grammatical missteps that characterize Indian English. And more importantly, what can be done about it? Read the exclusive interview here.