Questions tagged [subcontinental-english]
Questions related to the English language as it is spoken and written across the Indian Subcontinent in the South-Asian countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
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Can "doubt" sometimes mean "question"?
I often see questions on Stack Exchange sites which I presume are written by non-native English speakers who use the word "doubt" in place of the word "question". Is this a case of misunderstanding ...
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Is 'Updation' a correct word?
I was wondering whether 'updation' is correct English or not.
Sample sentence: I was involved in the updation of the website.
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Can 'revert' be used as a synonym of 'reply'?
I am a native speaker of American English, and I have only ever heard this usage of the word revert from one person. This person is not a native English speaker (he is from India), so he may just be ...
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What is wrong in "Please don't pluck the flowers" and other phrases used in the Indian subcontinent?
In the Indian subcontinent, especially India, there are many English words or phrases which are not a part of dictionary or not used in other parts of the world.
The first one is "Please don't pluck ...
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Is "prepone" being used outside India?
Prepone is a great word - it's the opposite of postpone. When you prepone a meeting, you change its scheduled time so that it occurs sooner than originally planned. Has this usage spread beyond India? ...
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Why has the word "thrice" fallen out of common usage?
I'm an American living in America, but my workplace has a lot of immigrants from India here. They all use "thrice" very commonly, which is wonderful to my ears! Thrice is such a delightful word.
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What is the origin and extent of the Indian English usage of "only" to emphasize something?
I live in southern India, and for a long time I've been curious about this phenomenon that I've observed.
Indian English uses the word "only" in a special way. It's used to emphasize things. Sort ...
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Indian English: What usage is allowed for "doubt" (meaning "question")?
I have a doubt about having a doubt. I learned from this question that in Indian English the word doubt is used to mean question, that is, as a countable noun. If my understanding is correct, the ...
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Indian-English usage of "Kindly"
I have noticed that the word "Kindly" is used a lot by some Indians speaking English as a second language. Does anyone know the origin of this?
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Is writing the pronoun "i" in lowercase a feature of Indian English?
The Rule
The personal pronoun “I” is always capitalized in English, regardless of its position in a sentence. This is an orthographic convention that every native speaker should know.
Whenever I ...
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Is "I" an alphabet or a letter?
I came across this sentence,
"Modi understands only one alphabet, and that is the capital I"
in the Indian writer Dr. Shashi Tharoor's recently published book "The Paradoxical Prime ...
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Why do South Indians call restaurants 'hotels'?
In South India, it's common to use the word 'hotel' when referring to what North Indians (and most of the rest of the world) know as a 'restaurant.' It's not just a phenomenon seen among small, micro-...
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Why doesn't the English language have distinct words to use when talking to elders? [closed]
In many of the languages that I've studied there are separate distinctions in the words to use when talking to elders and when talking to someone of your age or younger.
For e.g. in Hindi, if I ...
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What loanwords from the languages of India appear in cricket's vocabulary?
One of the things I find surprising is that India seems to have had little influence on the vocabulary of cricket. Notwithstanding India long being such a great cricketing nation, I can't immediately ...
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Saying “today morning” to mean “this morning”
As an American, I use the term this morning, but I’ve noticed some Asian Indian coworkers who always say today morning to mean what I mean by this morning.
Is this an Indian English “dialectism”? Is ...
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