Journal of English Language Teaching

Question Formation in Indian English

Madhuri Gokhale

Department of English, Fergusson College, Pune, Maharashtra

Keywords: Indian English, Question formation, Indian English Corpus

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Abstract

English is a glocal language in India as it satisfies both the global and the local needs. The phenomenal rise in the status of English has resulted in an adaptation of English to the cultural and pragmatic needs of the speakers of English in Asian and African countries. Several scholars have expressed the view that we lack exhaustive data for generalizing about the syntax of Indian English. This study is a modest attempt to examine question formation in Indian English as a system in its own right. For this study, examples have been selected from newspapers, magazines, literary texts, television and radio programmes.  A questionnaire was also designed to understand the views of British and Indian teachers on Indian English in general and question formation in particular. To make this study more representative, samples have also been collected from the ‘International Corpus of English-India Corpus’ and the ‘Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English’.

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References

Kachru, B.B. (1983). The Indianization of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Krishnaswamy, N. and Krishnaswamy, L. (2006). The story of English in India. New Delhi: Foundation Books.

Parasher, S. V. (1991). Indian English: Functions and form. New Delhi: Bahri Publications.