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Indian Dialect

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Indian dialect
INTRODUCTION

English has been with India since the early 1600's, when the East India Company started trading and English missionaries first began their efforts. A large number of Christian schools imparting an English education were set up by the early 1800's. The process of producing English-knowing bilinguals in India began with the Minute of 1835, which officially endorsed T.B. Macaulay's goal of forming "a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect" (quoted in Kachru 1983, p. 22). English became the official and academic language of India by the early twentieth century. The rising of the nationalist movement in the 1920's brought some anti-English sentiment with it - even though the movement itself used English as its medium.
DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS OF INDIAN ENGLISH
Indian English is a distinct variety of the English language. Many Indians claim that it is very similar to British English, but this opinion is based on a surface level examination of lexical similarities. Of course, one must keep in mind that not every linguistic item is used by every Indian English speaker and that a great deal of regional and educational differentiation exists. Even so, items can be identified which are indicative of Indian English speech and which are widely used. These operate on various phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic levels.
PHONOLOGY
One item that did come out of the experiment was that some Indian English speakers had a tendency to drop the -ed ending after /k/ and /t/ (ex: walked became walk) (1.6.5). Some interesting things seemed to be happening with the articulation of /ð/ (as in then), which normally is pronounced as an interdental /d/, but which sometimes seemed to become

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