Grammar

Indian English is the group of English dialects spoken primarily in the Republic of India.

As a result of British colonial rule until Indian independence in 1947, English is an official language of India and is widely used in both spoken and literary contexts. The rapid growth of India's economy towards the end of the 20th century led to large-scale population migration between regions of the Indian subcontinent and the establishment of English as a common lingua franca between those speaking diverse mother tongues.

With the exception of the relatively small Anglo-Indian community and some families of full Indian ethnicity where English is the primary language spoken in the home, speakers of English in the Indian subcontinent learn it as a second language in school. In cities this is typically at English medium schools, but in smaller towns and villages instruction for most subjects is in the local language, with English language taught as a modular subject. Science and technical education is mostly undertaken in English and, as a result, most university graduates in these sectors are fairly proficient in English.

Idiomatic forms derived from Indian literary and vernacular language have become assimilated into Indian English in differing ways according to the native language of speakers. Nevertheless, there remains general homogeneity in phonetics, vocabulary, and phraseology between variants of the Indian English dialect.

Grammar

The role of English within the complex multilingual society of India is far from straightforward: it is used across the country, by speakers with various degrees of proficiency; the grammar and phraseology may mimic that of the speaker's first language. While Indian speakers of English use idioms peculiar to their homeland, often literal translations of words and phrases from their native languages, this is far less common in proficient speakers, and the grammar itself tends to be quite close to that of Standard English.

Some characteristics are:

-1. Sentence structure: There is a tendency to use complex sentences as opposed to simple sentences.

-2. Function items: There is a classification in the Indian use of the article as “missing”, “intrusive”, “wrong”, “usurping”, and “dispossessed”. There are differences in frequency of the use of the article, and a number of differences are related to the acquisitional level of user.

-3. Tag questions: The structure of a tag questions is identical to that of many other non-native institutionalized varieties of English, (e.g. West African). That is the restricted form “isn’t it?” regardless number or person.

-4. Question formation: There is a tendency to form information questions without changing the position of the subject and auxiliary items. Example: “When you would like to go?”

-5. Selection restrictions: In English, certain verbs govern certain forms of complements, for example want takes only an infinitive complement. In Indian English these restrictions are not adhered to.

-6. Reduplication: This include various word classes, such as hot hot coffee (very hot coffee), to give crying crying (incessantly crying)

-7.  Use of reflexives for emphasis: e.g.  If you falter in the first few steps itself.

-8. Use of quotative marker: e.g. Indian woman was considered as a machine [as “to be”]

- 9. Use of a limiter/qualifier as a clitic: e.g. [There were] built up to live like that only.

-10. Use of discourse adverbs: e.g. Like this the position of women has been changed

-11. Lack of agreement between antecedent and pronoun: e.g. Women should take initiative to do any work she wants to do.

-12. Tendency of “idiom transfer”