World Englishes

World Englishes

When we talk about the World Englishes, we cannot ignore Indian English because it is
widely spoken. The Indian census has not actually counted the numbers of English speakers
recently; however, the English speakers are estimated to be in the range 9 percent (100 million)
to 33 percent of her population (350 million speakers). There are 100-200 million fluent speakers
of English, and 300 - 400 million people can manage to speak (Enokizono, 2000).

In India, there are 28 states and more than 18 official languages .
Recently, the survey said that around 325 languages are spoken, and more than 700 dialects exist
in India. Most languages in India link up with to one of the four language families: Indo-Aryan,
Dravidian, Tibeto-Burmese and Austro-Asiatic .

Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu, and Sindhi are common languages in North India. These
languages originated from the Sanskrit language and linked to the Indo-European group
. The people of North India often use Hindi language as a Lingua Franca
(Hohenthal, 2003). On the other hand, the South Indian languages such as Telugu, Tamil,
Kannada and Malayalam originated from Dravidian group, a very different group , When a North Indian migrates to South India and vice versa, English is used as a Lingua
Franca - a language that inherited from the British during their two-hundred-year rule. English is popular in India not only because English is an international language, rather English is a need for Indian people to communicate each other

English has various dialects in India due to the influence of local languages. In the
school, students have to study both local language and English as compulsory language. On
average, an Indian student needs to learn 3-4 languages. For example, someone from Western
India, has to learn the West Indian language Marwari, a dialect of Hindi, to deal with local
shopkeepers, servants, workers, whereas Hindi and English languages as a required course in the
school. In some cases, as a student has to move to another part say West India to East India,
he/she may have to learn an additional local language. These local languages mainly influence
the English pronunciation because people resort to local language to learn English pronunciation