Anglo-Indian English: A Nativized Variety of Indian English

Language in Society, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Dec., 1997). — pp. 561-589.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)