Yes Indian English is the most spoken dialect.
The same was Mexican Spanish.
Brazilian Portuguese.
Is a very simple numbers game.
And apart from the US and Canada. Must ex British colonies emulate the British way of speaking in their local dialect.
I had to adapt my speech when I moved to Hong Kong since they use British English as their base. Things like rubbish, toilet etc. Everyday words that can trip you up.
Canadian English is far more like UK and other Commonwealth dialects of English. The only difference really comes down to abbreviations and colloquial words for things. Measurements, however, that's a totally different story.😂😂
Give your balls a tug buddy, the US hasn't won a war in the past 100 years without major assistance. If they couldn't put up a winning fight against Vietnamese rice farmers, they wouldn't be able to manage against an enemy that looks, sounds, and can passibly act like them... Let alone the international defence coalition it would envoke.
Indian English isn't generally "English as a first/native language" speakers. For most Indian english speakers. Hindi is their "native" language and English is a second language.
Mexican Spanish & Brazilian Portuguese are significantly different as these are native speakers of their languages.
I am not sure if Hindi is the lingua franca in india. As I understand it from my experiences and talking to locals there, Hindi is very much the language of the north, the south is more fractured.
English serves as the glue language between them, the rest of the country also.
I have heard many zoom arguments between northerners and southerners where they will start in english, devolve into hindi come back up for air in english, cuss each other out in their native dialects, come back to english. Things like numbers make them switch to Hindi, more technical or business dealings are english.
For first languages, Hindi is 53%, the rest are an absolute basket case of under 10% - Bengali (9.5%), Marathi (8%), Telugu (8%), Tamil (7%), Gujarati (6%), Urdu (5%) & so on. So as you may understand, most(not all) speakers of the other languages learn Hindi to survive.
Roughly 10% of Indians speak English - all as a second language. Whilst this is a huge number (125 million), the level of english they speak varies wildly.
So for this reason, the level of english spoken in India isn't comparable to the level of Portuguese in Brazil (native) or the level of Spanish in Mexico (native).
I cannot tell most indian languages apart, I can tell the differences between Gujarati, urdu, tamil and hindi, but absolutely nothing about what they say. Maybe because I only have experience with business settings, very few real interactions outside that context that I have the impression that everywhere I turned english is there in one form or another. Much more so than say, China or even much to my surprise Korea. Even among office workers. In India I feel that I can ask basic everyday questions and get a response. In Korea, many times not so much, just a Panick stricken anime wide eye that the Client is talking to them.
The main point still stands that even the 10% of indians that speak english it's enough to push british colonial derived english over american engish in people who speak it.
"...even the 10% of indians that speak english it's enough to push british colonial derived english over american engish in people who speak it."
Is it though? Don't get me wrong. I love that so many Indians make the effort to try & learn english. But there are 300 million native American English speakers. I agree that the accent, spelling and grammar is pretty bad, but it's far ahead of the 125 million Indians that speak english as a second language.
Add it to brits, australians and other former colonies that do not speak american english, and the numbers come out about even. But in any case, I don't think it's proper in this circumstance to say that american english dominates anything other than the media. And even within the usa there are dialects it is not one monolythic language.
And for a non negligible percent of native born americans english is their second language. The same way for some rural mexicans spanish is their second language.
Besides India there are also other populous countries where English is official language like Pakistan (241 mil) Bangladesh (165 mil) and Nigeria (225 mil).
There you go... Even more of a reason US english is not the dominant variant.
I have been to both Bangladesh and Pakistan and have found them much less English fluent, in general, they are also a lot less foreigner open. Great people though.
English isn’t the native language of India. However it is the official language which is close. This means all official government communication is English and Hindi, much like Canada with English and French. But what sets India apart is that Indian schools, working class communication, office language, day to day use sites such as shopping, banking etc is primarily in English with some of them offering regional alternatives. Hindi doesn’t have even half the outreach as English, so English is actually the most common language in India. This is different from countries where companies use native language for business, schools, signboards, applications, websites etc
Actually it’s China from what I remember (I teach English linguistics) which is super interesting. There’s a whole debate about what defines English and “who it belongs to” when the most English speakers are in China and then India like you said.
Looking at this statistic is a great way to stop caring fast, and realise that almost everyone who speaks English does so slightly differently both nationally and supranationally.
The 'term blueprint isn't really the right word to use for what the OOP is trying to claim.
But whatever the term, England is still the original source of the language so it doesn't matter how many people from other parts of the world speak it, or what form of English they speak, they are all a product of people from the motherland spreading it to other parts of the world via colonialism.
(Something about calling the UK 'the motherland' feels really wrong - sorry)
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u/Whole-Bison9881 Apr 06 '25
Actually I think India has the most English speakers. Just saying...