Introduction
Over the last several decades, English has become the lingua franca for all kinds of ‘international transactions and communication settings’ (Meierkord and Schneider Reference Meierkord and Schneider2021). In multilingual contexts like India, it is also the lingua franca for intra–national interactions and transactions.
Despite the proliferation of World Englishes scholarship, however, the focus of study has been largely the educated speaker. In early World Englishes studies, Kachru (Reference Kachru1976) explained that, in India, the focus of attention was the educated speaker and, specifically, the standard variety of Indian English, which included a grammatically standard variety with a regional accent. While a standard English variety speaker with a regional accent might have been representative of the average user of English in the India of the 1960s and 1970s, the sociolinguistic reality of India today is vastly different, with English being used far beyond the educated elite. It is surprising, then, that despite hugely differing sociolinguistic realities of contexts of World Englishes uses, the subject of scholarly attention has not changed sufficiently. Englishes at the grassroots are now certainly being investigated in different contexts (Meierkord and Schneider Reference Meierkord and Schneider2021); however, scholarship on Indian English(es) at the grassroots is still very limited.
My interest in investigating Indian English at the grassroots levels came from both the dearth of scholarship in the area, and also personal experiences with examples of this variety of English, both in India and in Oman, a country with a substantial population of expat labor from India (Mehta Reference Mehta2022). Further, according to the website of the Embassy of India in Oman, of the approximately 700,000 Indians living in Oman today, the majority are unskilled and semi–skilled workers. An anecdote here will illustrate my experiences with Indian English at the grassroots in Oman. A year ago, my family and I needed to purchase a used car. WhatsApp messages are the main way of communication for most business transactions in Oman (personal knowledge from having lived here for 11 years). Based on the location the seller of the car, an Indian gentleman (information my husband had ascertained during his communication with the seller), had provided us via WhatsApp, we went to see the vehicle. We followed the map provided by our online navigation system, and got to where we thought the exact location was. We looked, in vain, for several minutes, before contacting the seller again by WhatsApp. The response we got was this: I am Prant Said. You come near to Bakry.
My husband asked me to ‘translate’ the utterance. Prant Said, I said, must be the seller’s name; Said is a common Muslim name, while Prant was probably a name originating from a part of India (an extremely linguistically and culturally diverse country) with which I was less familiar. Bakry was probably a bakery. After fruitlessly looking for a bakery, we called the seller. On speaking to him (in Hindi), I realized that we were on the wrong side of the street; we needed to go to the front entrance of a car dealership, which, indeed, was by a bakery. I then realized that Prant Said was not the seller’s name; rather, the phrase represented the words front side. The replacement of the labiodental /f/ with a bilabial [p] is because many Indian languages don’t have labiodental fricatives, and these are commonly replaced by bilabial stops (Grolman et al. Reference Grolman, Biktagirova and Kasimov2021), and this is reflected in spelling, where <f> is replaced with <p>. Said is the way he chose to spell side. Despite my familiarity with Indian languages, the fact that I had trouble understanding this interaction catalyzed my interest in the English used by less educated Indians.
The following sections provide background information on English in India and on Indians in Oman, where I currently reside, and have easy access to Indians at grassroots levels. Vacationing in India in the summer of 2024, I also gathered data from Indians at the grassroots. Both sources of data were analyzed for the current study, not as a means of comparison, but to have a larger, more diverse dataset.
English in India
Arriving as a tool of colonialism more than 400 years ago, English became widely used in the country, and today, remains a second language for millions of people. Shortly after Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, where he stated a need for the British to ‘form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern’, English was introduced into the education system (Sengupta Reference Sengupta2018). Post–independence, English continued to play a major role in the country, as it was viewed as more neutral than Hindi, the language that was adopted as the official language of India in 1950. In 1967, this neutrality resulted in the passing of the Official Languages Act, cementing the continuance of English as an official language. Today, it continues to be one of the 22 languages recognized by the Constitution of India, and is one of the most prolifically studied varieties of World Englishes. Sridhar (2020, 1) contends that Indian English ‘has perhaps the widest range of functions’, and stresses that Indians, like any other second language users, gain as much or as little proficiency as they need to make themselves comprehensible in their multilingual environments. The range of Englishes in India, then, varies greatly, ‘all the way from pidgins used by taxi drivers and railway porters to Queen’s English’ (Sridhar Reference Sridhar, Bolton, Botha and Kirkpatrick2020, 253).
Early scholarship on Indian English focused on differentiating it from the Inner Circle varieties (Kachru Reference Kachru1969; Nihilani et al. Reference Nihilani, Tongue and Hosali1978; Verma Reference Verma1980; Dubey Reference Dubey1991; Coehlo Reference Coehlo1997). Later work, advocating its acceptance as a legitimate variety unto itself, has focused more on variation within Indian English (Balasubramanian Reference Balasubramanian2009; Sailaja Reference Sailaja2009; Schilk Reference Schilk2009; Sedlatschek Reference Sedlatschek2009; Davidova Reference Davidova2012; Lange Reference Lange2012;). Numerous other studies focus on variation at the level of the register, and include Mukherjee and Hoffman (Reference Mukherjee and Hoffmann2006), Gries and Mukherjee (Reference Gries and Mukherjee2010) and Gargesh and Sharma (Reference Gargesh and Sharma2019). The focus of inquiry, however, has remained the language of the educated elite, the ‘inner circle of power and privilege’ (Ramanathan Reference Ramanathan1999, 211).
In India, English has been, and continues to be, ‘a symbol of modernization’ (Kachru Reference Kachru1976, 1). One could argue that it is not the educated inner circle, but the millions outside, who realize the power English holds, equated by Kachru to the power afforded by ‘the fabled Aladdin’s lamp’ (Reference Kachru1976, 1). While acknowledging that the terms ‘Indian English’ and ‘Standard Indian English’ are ‘abstractions’ (Sridhar Reference Sridhar, Bolton, Botha and Kirkpatrick2020, 254), scholars have still focused on Educated Indian English, to the exclusion of the English(es) used by millions of users at the grassroots levels, people who mainly use the language to communicate with other Indians within the sub–continent.
Hosali (Reference Hosali2008) describes the early emergence of English at the grassroots as what she terms a ‘Pidgin English’, arising ‘out of contact between the first British colonists and the local population’ (p. 563). Varieties of this pidgin have been variously labeled: ‘Butler English in Madras, Pidgin English in Bombay, Boxwallah English in Upper India, Cheechee English, and Babu English’ (p. 563). Despite their name, the English(es) used by the uneducated in the days of the British Raj are defined in the Hobson–Jobson, a 19th–century glossary of Anglo–Indian English, as ‘the broken English spoken by the native servants in the Madras Presidency’ (Yule & Burnell Reference Yule, Burnell and Crooke1903, 133). While the study of such English(es) was entirely dismissed initially, by the second half of the 20th century, as explained by Aitchison (Reference Aitchison2002), linguists began to realize the importance of such study for an understanding of interlanguage, and the creation of rule–governed pidgins. They, however, remain neglected in the study of World Englishes. Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2010) states that ‘now that times have changed and we are looking at a world that can no longer be neatly divided into clear and transparent categories, the theoretical paradigms need to be revised as well’ (p. xiv).
Indian English in the Sultanate of Oman
Indian English has spread beyond the borders of the subcontinent. There are Indian expatriates across the globe, including in the Middle East. The Sultanate of Oman is one of the Middle Eastern countries that benefits from a large migrant labor Indian population. Hendawy (Reference Hendawy2015, cited in Mehta, Reference Mehta2017) reports that most are uneducated or possess, at the highest, a middle–school education. While Hendawy’s statistics are almost a decade old, they could still be said to depict a general picture of the situation on the ground today. For these migrant workers from diverse parts of India, English forms a link both among Indians and between Indians and their Arab or international employers.
Aims of the current study
This qualitative study describes the features of the English used by Indians at the grassroots level. The study analyzes a small corpus of 13 photographs of public signs taken in Bengaluru, a large city in southern India, and 60 WhatsApp messages produced by four Indian migrant workers in Oman. The study is not a comparison of the English used in the two geographical contexts; rather, the features employed by Indian users at the grassroots to communicate (successfully) are identified and categorized.
Methodology
The photographs were all taken in August, 2024 in Bengaluru, a large, cosmopolitan city in southern India, and include public signs in stores, restaurant menus and street food cart menus. Balasubramanian (Reference Balasubramanian2009) explained that service encounters in India frequently turn into conversations. Through casual conversations with the proprietors of the store, street cart or restaurant where photographs were taken, therefore, it was ascertained that the creators of the signs did, indeed, have only a basic education, and usually in their first language (L1). While the initial dataset included signs advertising services, it was not possible to know with certainty that the signs were produced by Indians at the grassroots level. These were, therefore, deleted from the final dataset.
It is important to note that despite the fact that all photographs were taken in Bengaluru, the working classes in this city come from all over India. Bengaluru is a city that provides jobs to Indians from various parts of India, from states in the south, all the way to the states in the north east of the subcontinent. For the purposes of this study, the data was not controlled for regional variation. At a future date, a quantitative study with a more equal representation of data from many parts of India would be interesting.
The WhatsApp messages were written by four Indian migrant workers (all living in Muscat for longer than ten years) from different parts of India: Bihar and Kashmir in the north, and Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south. The participants consisted of two drivers, a house helper, and a carpenter, all of whom had only a primary school education in their L1s. There are 60 messages, some single utterances, and larger stretches of discourse, all written to me or my husband. The writers of the messages were asked whether they had any objections to their words being used in a study; none objected.
Both the photographs and the messages were analyzed, and features categorized as grammatical, lexical, and the orthographic representation of phonological features. As previous literature indicates (Verma Reference Verma1980; Dubey Reference Dubey1991; Hosali Reference Hosali1991), many features arise due to interference from an L1. Since several messages illustrated the process of translanguaging, this linguistic process is described in the last section of the analysis.
Results: Features of English at the grassroots
The following sections describe orthographic, lexical, and grammatical features identified in the dataset analyzed. Both photographs and illustrative examples from the WhatsApp messages are provided.
Orthographic representation of phonological features
Previous research (Sridhar, Reference Sridhar, Bolton, Botha and Kirkpatrick2020; Grolman at al., Reference Grolman, Biktagirova and Kasimov2021) frequently lists the following phonological features of Indian English: Use of long vowels in place of diphthongs; use of low unrounded back vowels in place of low rounded back vowels; lack of distinction between /v/ and /w/; use of stops or affricates for fricatives; and reduction of some consonant clusters. India being linguistically diverse, the specific features depend on the L1 background of the user of English.
The following section provides examples of written English from the data that illustrate the orthographic representation of several of the features mentioned above. I begin with the sign that provided part of the title to this paper, for which I chose to collocate the two words carlik and beep, for illustrative purposes.
In Figure 1, beef becomes beep because of a lack of the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/ in the writer’s phonemic inventory, which is replaced by a voiceless bilabial stop [p]. These changes in pronunciation are reflected in the orthography. The same phenomenon is seen in Figure 2, where, in the word civil, the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ is replaced by a [b], so that it is written as cibil. Another consonantal change is seen with garlic becoming carlik or carlic, because of a lack of the voiced velar stop /g/, which is frequently replaced by the voiceless velar stop [k] by speakers of Tamil (Balasubramanian, Reference Balasubramanian2013). In both cases, the lack of consistency with the orthography of the final consonant in the words suggests that the writer took little time to create their menu; consistency seems not as much a priority as conveying the message.
Figure 1. Restaurant billboard.
Figure 2. Signage for personal loans.
Figure 3 illustrates more examples of consonantal changes at the orthographic level.
Figure 3. Notice at a fast–food stall.
In Figure 3, the words kavap and gopi both reflect the change of the bilabial voiced stop /b/ to a voiceless [p] in the writer’s speech. This is, doubtless, because the creator of this sign speaks an Indian language which does not have a voiced bilabial stop in certain phonological environments. The menu item gopi mansure represents Gobi Manchurian, one of the most ubiquitous street foods in India. Street food carts advertise it as anything from Gopi Menchuri (writer’s L1 (probably Malayalam) not allowing a voiced bilabial stop in between two vowels (Krishnamurti, Reference Krishnamurti2003)) to Kopi Menjoori, as Figure 3 shows, gopi mansure.
The word gee in Figure 3 also shows a rendition of the English word ghee, or clarified butter. The absence of the <h> does not detract from a reader’s ability to comprehend the word. This is also true of the word rise for rice.
Figures 4 and 5 below illustrate orthographic representations of vowel changes. Vowel use in Indian English has been extensively documented (Phul and Kumar, Reference Phull and Kumar2016). Indian languages lack the short, unstressed vowel represented by a schwa in English as a distinct phoneme. This frequently results in a longer, full vowel replacing the schwa in English words, often represented orthographically by <a>.
Figure 4. Notice of services provided.
Figure 4 illustrates this phenomenon and its resultant orthographic representation. In the word voter, the schwa is replaced by an [a], resulting in the word being pronounced [votar] (or to be more accurate, [ʋotar], given that many Indian languages do not have the voiced labio–dental fricative /v/; as mentioned above, the same change is also illustrated by civil in Figure 2). Another feature is the orthographic representation of /ɜ:/. This vowel is rare in Indian languages, and frequently replaced by [a], making the writer produce barth instead of birth. With the word marriage, one can assume that the writer uses their knowledge of English to represent the word in an innovative way based on localized phonographic spelling. Thus, marriage becomes marig, albeit not impeding comprehension, at least for fellow Indians. Further, the word satifiket, meaning certificate, appears twice in the list in Figure 4. The orthographic reflection of the replacement of a schwa with an [a] is also seen in one instance of the word pepper, spelled peppar, in the street cart menu in Figure 1 above. However, another instance of pepper being spelled correctly, in addition to the schwa in ginger being correctly represented orthographically, once again, points to the lack of consistency in the spellings of English words. One wonders, then, to what extent the English of grassroots users is rule–governed, at least with respect to English orthography.
Figures 5 and 6 illustrate more vowel changes reflected at the orthographic level, this time in a sign advertising an apartment for rent, and one advertising incense sticks.
In Figure 5, hole in the advertisement refers to a hall, and once again, reveals the linguistic background of the writer. The south Indian language Malayalam (and most other Indian languages) lack the open back vowel /ɔ:/, and substitute it specifically with an [o:] (Mohanan and Mohanan, Reference Mohanan and Mohanan1984). Speakers of most other Indian languages other than Malayalam would use an [a:] instead. In the sign in Figure 5, one can posit that the word is represented orthographically by a Malayalee in the same way it is pronounced.
Figure 5. Rental advertisement placard outside an apartment.
Figure 6, an advertisement for pineapple–scented (flavor in the advert) incense sticks, shows a lack of the phoneme /v/ in the writer’s phonemic inventory. In the sign, this resulted in the orthographic deletion of the <v> and the use of a combination of three vowels, realized in pronunciation as [flawa]. Once again, one can surmise that the writer pronounces flavor in the same way flour is pronounced in a more standard variety, and represents this orthographically as flaour.
Figure 6. Advertisement for incense sticks.
Figure 7 illustrates another innovative orthographic representation, this time, of the word antiquity.
Figure 7. Bar bill for Antiquity Whiskey.
The figure is a bill for three shots of a whiskey called Antiquity. The waiter knew the whiskey, clearly, but lacked the spelling. He changed the first part of the word to something he did know how to spell –Aunty (also spelled auntie in standardized Englishes), followed by Kutty. Phonologically, the /kw/ cluster doesn’t exist in Indian languages (Khan, Reference Khan and Cheshire1991), and is frequently replaced by just a /k/ or a /k/ followed by /ʊ/. This simplification resulted in the whiskey being called Aunty Kutty.
Figure 8 illustrates another consonantal feature – the replacement of an interdental fricative with another alveolar fricative, which is also reflected in spelling.
Figure 8. Mural warning to not deposit garbage.
The absence of the interdental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ in most Indian languages (Chu and Chen, Reference Chu and Che2009) results in them being commonly replaced by the dental stops [t̪] and [d̪]. Orthographically, these are represented as <t> and <d>. In Figure 8, as a result of this, the word throw is orthographically represented as trow.
As shown in Figures 1–8, the orthographic representations of English words are either due to the lack of certain phonemes in the writer’s L1 or due to a simplification of the spelling of the English word in ways revealing particularities of English usage at the grassroots; despite this, what is communicated in these signs appears to be understandable by the locals.
Lexical features
Previous research has consistently identified certain lexical features including the borrowing of Indian words to accommodate a lack of an appropriate cultural term (Balasubramanian, Reference Balasubramanian2016). Other features include innovations, collocational differences, and semantic shift (Dubey, Reference Dubey1991; D’Souza, Reference D’Souza1997). The examples in Figures 9 and 10 are indicative of this.
Figure 9 illustrates an innovation (bottom wears) to accommodate a lexical gap in the writer’s English. The sign is for a shop advertising kurtis (a borrowing from Indian languages for long Indian shirts), leggings (standard), and bottom wears – the innovation meaning ‘intimate apparel’.
Figure 9. Shop advertisement for garments.
Figure 10 illustrates semantic extension. Salesgirl is not a girl who works in sales, but a word that is used for any salesperson. The writer of this advertisement was specifically looking for a male salesperson, and used the term they were familiar with – a male salesgirl.
Figure 10. Advertisement for a salesperson.
Grammatical features
One of the most commonly identified features of Indian English is the use of stative verbs in the progressive aspect, illustrated by a sentence like I am having a headache (Van Rooy, Reference Van Rooy2014). Other features include the overuse of the present participial verb form without the accompanying auxiliary (I going there now), the idiosyncratic use or non–use of articles and prepositions (I coming at your house; I am taking bath).
The sentences from the WhatsApp messages in examples (1) to (16) illustrate many of these features, with renditions in standard English provided within parentheses. Note that the sentences are represented as they were written; while the writers occasionally used question marks at the end of questions, none of their affirmative utterances ended with a period.
Uses of the progressive aspect (sometimes without the auxiliary)
(1) What time coming sir? (What time are you coming, sir?)
(2) I’m not understanding you mam (I don’t understand you, ma’am)
(3) Tomorrow I coming (I am coming tomorrow)
(4) Yes you giving that biscuit yesterday, oh my god, so good (The biscuit you gave me yesterday was so good)
(5) Yes mam, I drop and I coming back your house now ok (Yes madam, I have dropped [the kids] and I am coming back to your house now)
(6) Coming 15 minet (I am coming in 15 minutes)
All these sentences use the progressive aspect, most without an accompanying auxiliary. Sentence 5 above also illustrates another feature identified in previous research (Balasubramanian, Reference Balasubramanian2009) – the use of transitive verbs without an accompanying direct object; the verb drop, in this context, is a transitive verb that requires a direct object to be expressed overtly (in this case, the children), which the user doesn’t use.
Divergent use or absence of prepositions
(7) Waiting for line I came (I have arrived; I am now waiting in line.)
(8) I am coming your house 3:15 (I will be at your house at 3:15.)
(9) I will be there your house (I will be at your house.)
(10) One day I’m working my sponsor house (One day, I work at my sponsor’s house.)
(11) Mam everyday I’m coming cycle If I’m come cycle no problem in gate. (Ma’am, every day I ride my bicycle. If I come on my bike, I have no problem at the gate.)
(12) I give keys one lady mam (I gave the keys to one lady, ma’am)
(13) Everyday I’m coming going just time (Every day I will be there just on time)
(14) Now I'm ruwi sudden middle road stop my car tomorrow I going to garage. (Now I’m in Ruwi. Suddenly my car stopped in the middle of the road. Tomorrow I will go to the garage)
As illustrated by most of these sentences, users frequently don’t use a preposition where one might expect a preposition in other varieties of English, or employ a different preposition, as illustrated in sentence 7.
Absence of articles
Figure 11 documents the lack of a definite article; standardized Englishes would have We declare the last Sunday of every month a holiday.
Figure 11. Notice by the Nagarthpet Appliances Spares Association.
Lack of subject–verb agreement
Several examples of a lack of subject–verb agreement were found in the data, including Figure 12, which claims that a king never bargain, missing the third person singular –s on the verb bargain.
Figure 12. Note at a clothing store.
Other examples from the WhatsApp messages include the following:
(15) And afternoon he bring your car, ok? (He brings your car this afternoon, ok?)
(16) Sir today my brother go evening (Sir, today my brother goes in the evening)
What is noteworthy about these illustrative sentences is that there is little consistency in the grammatical features described. While some sentences illustrate a lack of an article, in others, the users do use an article. Also, while some sentences illustrate an idiosyncratic use of prepositions, others do not. It appears, then, that no generalizations can be made from the current analyses. The results do, however, point to a need for further research to determine if and how the English used at the grassroots is systematic.
Having discussed features of Indian grassroots English at the orthographic, lexical, and grammatical levels, I now turn to translanguaging, another feature of English at the grassroots level in India (Schneider, Reference Schneider2016).
Translanguaging
García (Reference Garcia2009, 45) defines translanguaging as ‘the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features … in order to maximize communicative potential.’ While bilinguals actively engage in translanguaging, the process also features in multilingual situations, where more than 2 languages are used to get a message across (Schneider, Reference Schneider2016).
An example of translanguaging was provided by a household helper wanting to know if we had a driver. Possibly feeling that the combination of English and Arabic would make her question clearer, the speaker used the Arabic word fee, which translates to ‘do you have’ or ‘is there’ or ‘yes’, depending on how it is used. The helper’s question was phrased Driver fee?
Two other such examples from the WhatsApp messages include:
(17) Screws fee (Arabic)? (Do you have any screws?)
(18) Home coming, badain (Arabic) message, ok? (I will go home and later message you, ok?)
In example 18, the Arabic word badain means later.
Example 19 shows a case of translanguaging with three languages involved: English, Arabic, and Hindi, although the Hindi word malum, meaning ‘to know’ or ‘knowledge’, is also used in Arabic today.
(19) Today fee (Arabic) tomorrow no fee (Arabic) ana mafee (Arabic) malum (Hindi). (Today I have, tomorrow maybe I won’t have, I don’t know).
In this sentence, the Arabic word mafee literally means ‘not there’, or ‘don’t have’. In the context of mafee malum, the simple translation could be either ‘don’t know’ or ‘have no knowledge’.
This section concludes with Figure 13, a humorous illustration of translation, which shows that mixing languages and translating between multiple languages can be extremely challenging!
Figure 13. Sign at a bakery.
Figure 13 shows the price for an Omani pastry, a beehive bun. The sign in English says that each beehive bun (each piece, shortened to Pc) is 0.490 Omani Rials. The translated Arabic version, however, reads beehive bun per computer – indicating that the shortened Pc had been interpreted as computer. This, it would seem, could be an example of translating (and the use of two languages in one phrase) gone rather wrong, possibly with the help of AI! While extremely relevant to the English(es) produced at the grassroots today, a discussion of the use of AI in translation is beyond the scope of this paper.
Conclusion
This study raises many questions. How comprehensible is the English used by Indians at the grassroots to an audience not familiar with the phonology of Indian languages and the resultant spelling of words? I began with a sentence that even I found difficult to understand. Where does Indian English at the grassroots fit into the study of Indian Englishes? How is it different from other varieties of Indian English? The results show that most of the features used at the grassroots have been described in previous studies on Indian English – from those appearing on initial features lists in the early impressionistic studies of the 1980s and 1990s (Schmied Reference Schmied, Blaicher and Glaser1994), to those appearing in today’s data–driven studies. What differentiates the English described in the current study is that there seems to be a lack of consistency in the use of the described features; one of the hallmarks of data–driven studies of World Englishes has been the search for consistency, where a structure could be regarded as a characteristic feature, and not an error or idiosyncrasy. It is imperative that this seeming lack of consistency be researched in more detail in future studies. With the English described in this study, it also seems that the form or shape of the message is not as important as its function – that the words get their intended message across. However, it is also clear, from the examples provided in this study, that the intended message is not always clear to an outsider. Further, another possible way the English at the grassroots is different from other varieties of English in India is the frequency of co–occurrence of features within utterances. This also needs to be investigated with a much larger dataset than that used in the current study.
Diversity and plurality in Englishes have been central to World Englishes studies for decades. With English in India, register studies certainly went beyond early, impressionistic studies, and have pointed to the complexity and heterogeneity of the Indian situation. The time is now ripe to look beyond the register. It is time to examine the varieties of English used by more than educated, urban Indians. It is time to go beyond the existing models of World Englishes that focus exclusively on the Englishes used by the elite. Buschfeld (Reference Buschfeld, Meierkord and Schneider2021) is clear in recommending that grassroots Englishes need to be a ‘new player in the World Englishes paradigm’ (p. 25). Similarly, Deshors (Reference Deshors and Deshors2018) is clear in her critique of existing models of World Englishes in their inability to capture the true extent of variation. She explains that ‘the reality in which English is evolving today is of a nature and complexity that urges us to pause and reassess our theoretical models of World Englishes and their validity in the 21st century’ (p. 2).
CHANDRIKA BALASUBRAMANIAN’s book Register Variation in Indian English (2009) was one of the first large–scale empirical, corpus–based investigations of variation within an international English. While she predominantly has published on World Englishes, and specifically on Indian English, she has also published on various areas of language pedagogy, and her recent work focuses on the pedagogical implications of World Englishes scholarship. Balasubramanian currently lives and works at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman, where she teaches sociolinguistics and language. Email: chandribala@squ.edu.om
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