Category Archives: English in India

As youngsters seeking jobs and careers abroad throng the spoken English centres for a crash course to brush up their English-speaking skills, some schools in the city have decided to take up the task as early as in Class I … Continue reading →

The only time Suman Chhabria-Addepali speaks to her child in Sindhi, her mother tongue, is while playing ‘Gil go ladi’, a game she learnt on her mother’s lap. She considers English to be her first language. This 27-year-old Sindhi, who is … Continue reading →

Shweta Jadhav, 7, speaks Marathi at home, Bambaiya in the schoolyard and a garbled version of English in the classroom. She is one of thousands of children swept onto unfamiliar linguistic shores by the tidal wave of English-medium education. The … Continue reading →

In a trend that runs contrary to the state’s efforts to promote English language in this age of globalisation, the results of class X board exams announced on Thursday show that not a single student out of 53 who made … Continue reading →

Innovation and creativity are best expressed in one’s mother tongue. But the mushrooming English medium schools and the craze of young parents to enrol their kids in them is diluting this. The times of India, November 23, 2009. Read more…

With the potential of the Queen’s language being unleashed with the outsourcing wave, the ability to speak it well has become a prime asset. That’s one powerful reason why India gets pitched so well as an outsourcing destination, apart from … Continue reading →

Yeh Dil Maange More! (Hindi: यह दिल मांगे मोर!, Urdu: !یہ دِل مانگے مور) is an advertising slogan coined for Pepsi at JWT by Anuja Chauhan in 1998. It combines Hindi-Urdu and English, and literally meaning This Heart Desires More, which later became a popular slogan. The slogan and its derivatives have been used in multiple contexts … Continue reading →

Hinglish, a portmanteau of “Hindi” and “English”, is a hybrid of English and South Asian languages – it is a code-switching variety of these languages whereby they are freely interchanged within a sentence or between sentences. While the name is based on the Hindi language, … Continue reading →

By the time Shyamoli Panchal returns home each evening she has miraculously mutated from an eight-yearold schoolgirl to a knocked-around war veteran. Her knees are bruised and often bleeding, her socks are gathered in an ungainly heap at the bottom … Continue reading →

Hundreds of thousands of students in India will soon be learning a new version of the English language, complete with changes to pronunciation and nursery rhymes. BBC news, May 17, 2000. Read more…

An article about Hinglish, a mix of English and Hindi that is the fatest growing language in India and may soon be spoken by more native speakers than standard English. Some foreing compnaies in India are now advertsing in Hignlish … Continue reading →

Hinglish – a hybrid of English and south Asian languages, used both in Asia and the UK – now has its own dictionary. Is it really a pukka way to speak? BBC News, 8 November 2006. Read the whole article…

Braj Kachru argues that, “the time is right for India to exploit its most valuable export commodity: English”. Guardian Weekly, October 25, 2001. Read the whole article…

Usha Rai reports on India’s plans to open its first English teaching centre in Vietnam. Guardian Weekly, October 25, 2001. Read the whole article…

An article from Wikipedia encyclopaedia looking at the varieties of English spoken in India. Read the whole article…

A brief overview of the English education system in general. Read the whole article…

From postcolonialweb.org. Looks at language policies in education in India.  Read the whole article…

An article by Dr. G. Manivannanthat looks at the history and importance of English in India. It takes a positive view of the role of English in uniting Indians, as a link language or lingua franca within India and as … Continue reading →