Quote:
Originally Posted by thebasketballgeek
I could visit Punjabi and get by purely on English unless I go back to the pind. Even then a lot of the youth will be quite fluent in English.
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My own observation is English seems less and less prevalent in public life in India. It's striking how most national politicians speak Hindi today. Gone are the days when Nehru addressed the nation in English. Modi speaks almost only Hindi, and I find it fascinating how people from all across India interact with him in Hindi on Twitter, even when they come from non-Hindi-speaking areas.
I was thinking maybe English was just a parenthesis in Indian history. With 1.5 billion people, colonization now being more than 70 years ago, old millennial trends are just reasserting themselves, and the British-colonial-followed-by-English-legacy was just a parenthesis in a much longer history.
Besides, when Indians speak English, it's less and less real English, and more a sort of Indian language sometimes hard to follow, with lots of antiquated words not used in the UK or US anymore. I suppose the gap will only grow in the future, with probably lots of Hindi words entering that Indian English that Anglophones from the rest of the world will not understand.