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Anglo-Indian English: A nativized variety of Indian English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2009

Gail M. Coelho
Gail M. Coelho
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1196, gail@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu
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Abstract

The speech of native speakers of Indian English has generally been neglected in studies of English in South Asia. This article describes a variety of Indian English used by a section of the Anglo-Indian community in Madras, South India. A comparison of this variety to available descriptions of “General” or “Educated” Indian English shows that the two are substantially similar, but that the Anglo-Indian variety differs in two features: deletion of/h/ (h-dropping) and the distribution of r-lessness. The community shows classbased variation in the phonological feature of h-dropping and in one syntactic feature: auxiliary movement in questions. Sources for features of Anglo-Indian English are discussed, including possible inheritance from both standard and non-standard BrE dialects as well as transfer from Tamil, the likely substrate Indian language for this section of the Anglo-Indian community.(South Asia, Indian English, language variation)

Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1997 , pp. 561 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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