Distribution

INDIA, PAKISTAN, BANGLADESH, NEPAL, SRI LANKA, MALDIVES, Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, Mauritius.

Introduction

Some sixteen major languages are spoken in the countries of the Indian subcontinent. The four languages of South India (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telegu) are members of the independent Dravidian family. The others are all Indo-Aryan languages, members of that branch of the Indo-European family which derives from Sanskrit. They include the national languages of India (Hindi), Pakistan (Urdu), Bangladesh (Bengali), Nepal (Nepali), Sri Lanka (Sinhala) and the Maldives (Divehi), besides many important regional languages of India and Pakistan (Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Panjabi). Several of these languages have been spread by emigration to other parts of the world, and the United Kingdom now has large communities of speakers of Bengali, Gujarati, Panjabi (many of these are also fluent in Urdu), and Tamil.

As a result of the long period of British rule, English has become very firmly established in South Asia. Even those with no direct command of English will have been exposed to its indirect influence through the very numerous loanwords which have entered all South Asian languages. At the other end of the spectrum, English continues to be used as a natural medium of expression by those with the highest level of education, for whom the most prestigious variety of the language remains standard British English spoken with ‘received pronunciation’. In between these two groups lie those who have varying degrees of command over ‘Indian English’.