Indian English = Standard English?

Guest   Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:18 am GMT
Is Indian English standard english, because the largest population of English speakers is from India?
Guest   Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:36 am GMT
No. They aren't native speakers.
RalphZ   Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:51 am GMT
I think they are, you are a native speaker anyway when the official language of your country is English.
RalphZ   Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:54 am GMT
Think about china, a lot of Chinese there they don't really speak Chinese, they might speak Uigur or Korean or Mongolian and sometimes even Russian, but you can't say that "Chinese are not native Chinese speakers"
M56   Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:56 am GMT
There are many forms of English in India, Standard Indian English is just one of them.
Guest   Mon Sep 10, 2007 7:42 am GMT
You are native speaker if that is the language you speak growing up. It has nothing to do with the official language of where you reside.
Guest   Mon Sep 10, 2007 11:59 am GMT
Is there a "standard English". Would thet be RP, GAE, or (perhaps nowadays) Estuary?
Jim   Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:53 pm GMT
There is no standard dialect. I would call any notion of "standard English" which fails to cut accross the majority of dialects pretty useless.

"you are a native speaker anyway when the official language of your country is English." writes RalphZ. I disagree. The Guest of Mon 10 Sep 2007 7:42 am GMT got it right. "you can't say that 'Chinese are not native Chinese speakers'" ... you certainly can & you'd be perfectly correct if they don't happen to speak the language.
furrykef   Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:54 pm GMT
To answer the question, Indian English isn't really what the rest of the world considers "Standard English" insofar as there is such a thing. It isn't an international variety of English.

- Kef
M56   Tue Sep 11, 2007 6:17 am GMT
<Is there a "standard English". Would thet be RP, GAE, or (perhaps nowadays) Estuary? >

No, there is no single Standard English, but there are Standard Englishes. Quite a few of them, in fact.
M56   Tue Sep 11, 2007 6:19 am GMT
<Indian English isn't really what the rest of the world considers "Standard English" insofar as there is such a thing.>

Really? Where did you get that information from?
Divvy   Tue Sep 11, 2007 6:21 am GMT
Kef, does a Standard English have to be internationally useful?
M56   Tue Sep 11, 2007 7:08 am GMT
<Kef, does a Standard English have to be internationally useful? >

Not necessarily. Standard Indian English has the potential to be used by millions intranationally.
Mirror   Tue Sep 11, 2007 9:09 am GMT
Men are divided into different nationalities, but they're still men. Chinese has different dialects and those are still Chinese. In fact, the ancient Chinese sounds more like Cantonese. Something happened in between and one day Mandarin rules! Who knows. Maybe there are so many Indians that one day we all have to learn Hindustani.
Native Korean   Tue Sep 11, 2007 9:57 am GMT
Although English is one of the official languages in India, most Indians do not speak English at home.
They speak their own languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil and etc as their first language.
A lot of uneducated people do not speak English at all, and even educated people who know how to speak English generally have a strong accent according to my experience.

I wouldn't say Indians are native speakers of English!