I was watching this video on YouTube discussing English in India (you don’t have to watch the video). One thing that struck me was what the people being interviewed though was the percentage of ‘fluent’ English speakers was. The low end was 40% with others speculating 70% or even higher. It was a real worry to many of them that their native languages might be dying out. A quick Google search, however, says it’s more like 12%. Anyone have a firm figure on that? My guess as to the answers is that of the more affluent or educated Indian’s it’s probably higher, and that they are basically using the flawed ‘well, all my friends do X’ method. It’s been nearly 2 decades since I was last in India, and my own take was that most of the people I was exposed to spoke English…but I was exposed mainly to engineers or other people involved in the work I was doing, or in shops or restaurants/bars, so not exactly a representative sample.
ETA: On a personal note, I’ve always loved Indian accented English. I’ve never had much issue understanding the accent, and I think it’s kind of funny they have to provide subtitles since I didn’t have any issues understanding what they were saying.
You might have to define ‘fluent’ somewhat loosely, at least judging by the ‘English’ speaking people from the Sub Continent that staff some call centres.
India is unusual in that it has no national language. Even 71 years after the end of British rule, English remains the only common language, although it would be unrecognisable to most of us.
FWIW, I have a Facebook friend from India, who of course speaks English (else I wouldn’t be able to talk to him, unless he took up Spanish for some bizarre reason). He speaks 8 languages! 8!!! Those include English, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, and who knows what else.
On a tourist visit to India last year, I found a fairly decent number of locals spoke passable English. Mind you, English knowledge is kind of a must for the tourist industry, but even when we encountered others, a lot of the educated class spoke much better English than some call center types. OTOH, even the street hawkers near tourist sites spoke a few words to do business - “you want to buy photo? One hundred rupee”. They could do rudimentary math. Ditto for annoyingly persistent tuttut taxi drivers. Or the guy who tried to pull the classic scam “Oh, yes, I just got off work at your hotel, I recognize you… Please, I show you my friend who know good tour operator…you follow me…” Based on the sheer number of people I would guess it’s closer to 40% than 70%, but that’s still a lot.
Hm. In the opinion of an Oxbridge graduate, do I speak fluent English? I don’t talk of “an 'istorical event” but rather “a historical event”, I don’t think tea is a meal, and I would think nothing of going outside in my pants. My point is, English is a polycentric language with no single source of authority for what’s correct or incorrect, and India does, in fact, have its own variety of English, and being fluent in that doesn’t mean you’re not fluent in English, just that you’re not fluent in Oxbridge or Back Bay or Cicero English.
Not Indian but Pakistani. But, similar history.
The answer depends on how you define “fluency”. And that probably accounts for the variation in numbers that you see.
About 10-20% of people would use English as the day to day working language. A higher proportion, perhaps 50% end up using English alongside local vernacular or Urdu/Hindi. Mostly they’ll use English for written stuff and local language for oral communication.
Just to clarify, the use of English is not (totally) correlated to social class. My sister and I are both lawyers. She works for a large cooperation. She is in the first identified cohort. I am in private General practice. I am in the second.
I will say that when I was growing up American accents and turns of phrases were heavily discouraged. I do wonder sometimes it call center people exaggerate their accents as a consequence.
The first thing a linguist learns about the distinction between a dialect and a language is that the distinction between a dialect and a language isn’t a linguistic concept.
What is a dialect and what is a language is a social and political concept, and has nothing to do with any observed features of how people speak.
The results of the EF EPI test are supposed to be standardized, though the result is an index not a % of people who speak English to a certain level.
On this scale India comes out in the ‘moderate’ category, 27th out of 80 (somewhat random) non English speaking countries included. Pakistan which was also mentioned comes out ‘low’ at 57th, though per the Wikipedia link given earlier a much higher % of people there speak English than in India.
But I’m sure people with first hand experience would question numbers and rankings in both lists. For example I lived for awhile in the Netherlands and don’t doubt their No 1 ranking among 80 countries in the EF EPI thing, they must be close to top anyway among countries where English isn’t anybody’s mother tongue. But wiki’s 90% figure still seems high to me. Blue collar people long out of school in the Netherlands often don’t remember much of their English IME.
Likewise it ranks Hong Kong only one notch ahead of South Korea, not my experience either. When in ROK I sometimes have to politely brush aside younger people’s desire to practice English speaking to me (I want to practice Korean when I’m there) but the great majority of people are relieved I’m not forcing them to try to remember their school English, which many no longer have a word of practically speaking. Lots more people speak English easily in HK IME (albeit I don’t speak any Chinese dialect, I only read). Also the wiki list quotes PRC as <1% English speakers, but the EF-EPI puts them 36th out of 80.
Speaking as someone who has been to India more than a handful of times and works with call centers there, as well as with HR and recruiting in various areas around India; and, with our own brand of fluency, I would say that perfect, little to no accent English speaking seems like 10-12% of our workforce. I would raise that number to 20% if you count the accent as “barely understandable” or “stereotypical call center accent.” If you want to talk about just getting around and ordering something, I will be generous and say that English speaking is around 40% (50% if near a university). I would also say that high level of english fluency and accent-less speaking correlates well with high caste or wealthy background.
As a first generation immigrant from India, I find some of the stereotyping and opinions expressed as facts, not up to the standards of GQ.
Also, I have visited Italy, Poland and Germany. It will be naive of me to say that I understand the linguistic makeup of Europe based on these small trips. If I did form an opinion, that would be highly GQ unworthy.
