There are quirks to speaking with developers or workers in India who haven't also been trained partly in the US or Europe. A scattered assortment of unusual phrases or idiosyncrasies you may hear:
-- "please revert at the earliest"
-- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard
-- A tendency to use abbreviations or acronyms which are not commonly understood, even by the direct team. E.g. "please excuse the IVR not working properly today" as if everyone is familiar with that abbreviation for the phone mail system.
There are other more amusing quirks to I'll try to remember and post. Such as, "do the needful". And not working on state holidays, aka Tuesdays.
>-- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard
To be clear, India does not use a 10000 grouping system; that's China's and Japan's system. India's system is that the first group is three digits, and subsequent ones are two digits. eg 10^9 is 1,00,00,00,000
I work as a Software Engineer in Japan. We have a lot of "non-standard" abbreviations and phrasings too. Here's a few that come to mind:
MTG = meeting
MGR = manager
DL = download
expressing dates without separators: 2020/07/25 becomes 20200725 (of course, this is alwais in the Japanese field order which I find the most sensible one)
Most of the time Indian developers are working with American or European clients. I have seen multiple situations where non Indians make fun of and devalue contributions by Indian developers because they use phrases like codes , needful and revert. Just avoid using these phrases. There are other battles to fight.
I first came across this about 20 years ago when I was learning Java. There was no StackOverflow. Sun's Java forum (java.net?) was the place to go for beginners. I clicked into a thread "How to Send SMS" that had thousands of replies spanning several years and every reply had almost the same format:
"please send the codes!!! some@email.com"
All with Indian names and emails. I was pretty naive about the world then so I assumed it was some joke I was missing. I would check in every year or so and the thread kept growing until the forum was shut down when Oracle acquired Sun. I didn't realize until later that these were all university students doing the same Java SMS project year after year. There was some blog post years later about that epic thread but I doubt it's been archived.
I think either is ok depending on your intention: codes is to suggest the stuff is plural, countable etc, e.g. you have a Bash script, Makefile and Java project (full of files), this is a set of heterogeneous countable things, hence codes. Code is a "mass noun" implying countability or cardinality is irrelevant, e.g. push the code to github.
That said I always remarked Indians says "maths" where I would say "math", and I figured there must be some cross-language transfer going on from Hindi or other languages which use plural for intellectual property </wild guess>
It's closer to how some dialects of English will say "Do you want to come with?" and consider that a complete sentence.
FWIW, there is no harm in the correction. "codes" is correct in Indian English, Indian English is a variant just as much as Australian English is, and people abroad will auto-bucket you as less intelligent than someone speaking more common forms. So it is still a smart action to switch yourself to the more common forms.
I don’t think fish / fishes is quite right. Look up “code” in the dictionary and you get at least two different senses of the word:
1. System of substituting letters/words/symbols/etc. for letters/words/symbols/etc, e.g. “morse code”. Countable noun.
2. Computing program instructions. Uncountable noun.
This is not like fish / fishes, because “fish” is countable—I can have one fish or two fish. When talking about computer programming instructions, I cannot have one code or two codes, but I can have one line of code or two lines of code. Just like I cannot have a bowl of one thousand rice, but I can have a bowl of one thousand grains of rice. Rice is “uncountable” in the grammatical sense even though it seems like you should be able to count it.
In Indian english, my understanding is that for the second sense above, “codes” is correct and “code” is incorrect. In that sense it is probably similar to “data”, in the historical usage where “data” was plural (in modern usage, “data” is often considered singular).
So, “The codes are on my hard drive.” makes sense to Indian english speakers, and “The data are on my hard drive.” makes sense in historical (say, early 20th-century) English. There is a singular version of data, “datum”, but rarely used.
The great grandparent's post is more difficult to read than it otherwise would be to the vast majority of HN users who use other English dialects.
American, Australian, German, British, etc. English are all mutually intelligible with no difficulty, while the... *counts... 11 deviations from the more common (as determined by looking at HN posters) grammars in the great grandparent require a bit of work on the part or the reader.
While what I'll say will surely be controversial and will lead to many down votes, Indian dialect of English is not considered a "standard." As a result, the correctness of something in Indian dialect does not mean it is "proper English" or "correct English".
If you go to non-English speaking Europe, most textbooks come from the British Council, and teach British English.
If you go to China and a lot of Asian countries, a lot of their textbooks come from the USA, and will teach American English.
You might find some Aussie textbooks in Japan or China... You will not find a country that speaks Indian English outside of India.
So, "color" or "colour" are both correct because they are correct in one of the "standards" of English. "Codes" then is not correct because it is incorrect in what's considered the "standards" of English.
For the record, I personally am from neither US, UK, or any other English-speaking country. I also think correcting people's English on HNews is silly.
I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself.
Are you going to claim that Canada uses nonstandard English simply because it's a hybrid of US and UK English with a few phonetic and lexical twists of its own? Or that Scottish English is somehow less legitimate than England's English (the two are quite different) despite Scotland being part of the UK for centuries?
As well, Indian English is spoken by an estimated 125 million people, more people than the total populations of the UK and Canada combined and about a third of the US population. And this is the predominant version of English in a country of more than a billion people, which makes it standard enough there to count as a standard.
Deferring to a standard requires a context in which to say whether one is or isn't speaking standardly. Since we're discussing a topic about India on a US-centric but globally inclusive website, either we should insist that everyone uses the site's predominant US variety of English (I'm happy we don't do this) or the Indian commenter should be free to use standard Indian English in discussing this without that dialect being called wrong.
> I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself.
I try to see it from the perspective of a non-native speaker trying to learn English.
If I know no English, and pay for teachers to teach me English, I definitely do not want to be taught Indian English.
Not because it's wrong, not because it's $whatever_adjective, but because it will sound incorrect to the majority of native English speakers that are not of Indian origin.
In a similar manner, you don't see Cockney English being taught, and you don't think of as Cockney English as "correct". It has indeed its rules, and is perfectly understandable to the speakers. I have nothing against Cockney English. That said, I wouldn't want to be taught Cockney English by professionals who claim "it is correct." It is indeed correct, but it will hurt my communication even in the most of the UK.
There’s a difference between “This is the version of English that I want to learn because it is well-respected,” and “I am going to tell you that you are wrong because your version of English is not well-respected.”
I want to point out your claim about 'majority of English speakers'. The number of English speakers in the Indian subcontinent is much higher than anywhere else in the world, including US.
If numbers decide what is the norm, Indian English should be it. However, I feel like there are other factors that you are using to determine the "correct" English.
IMHO everything other than British English is a regional derivative. The software world has caught up to that fact and soon the popular language tests will follow. They would need to do the needful eventually. Lol.
It depends on the goal, though. What if you were a Spanish speaker trying to move to India, and didn't already speak any Indian language to a useful level? I'm guessing in that scenario you'd want to learn Indian English.
Same thing if you were a call center representative communicating in English with Indian audiences.
As for non-native English speakers, there are already some choices to make when deciding what to learn. If someone learns US English as a second language, they'll find it a lot harder to understand people from the UK, especially less globally common styles like those in Scotland and Northern Ireland. But if someone learns British English, they'll probably find those styles easier to understand than Louisiana or Newfoundland English, to name two less standard North American varieties. (Cockney is especially difficult to understand for non-native speakers of any kind, so I'm leaving it out of this.)
In this case, we're discussing an Indian commenter's choice to use their local dialect of English when discussing a topic about Indian tech companies with a global English-speaking audience.
Yes, I admit I thought "codes" was wrong when I first read the comment, but that's because I didn't know that aspect of Indian English, and I no longer view it as wrong. Anyway, it didn't detract from my interest in or respect for the commenter's substantive opinion.
Indian English is also spoken in surrounding countries (Nepal, Sri Lanka). Anyway, what does the international exportation of a dialect have to do with legitimacy?
Linguistically speaking, if enough people speak a dialect, then it's legitimate. And there are more fluent Indian English speakers than there are British English ones.
Linguistic prescriptivism is just class oppression by another name. As long as language can be understood it can't be wrong. Intelligibility is what matters, not if someone subscribes to the particulars of a given style guide. Saying otherwise just serves to suppress the voices of people who speak other dialects.
Textbooks for French teach Parisian French, the kind standardized by the Académie française. Does this mean that Québécois is wrong? Does this mean that when the Swiss say “septante” we should correct them and say “Ce n’est pas septante, c’est soixante-dix.”
The fact that we teach French according to the Académie française and teach Spanish according to the Real Academia Española is just due to the political power of those institutions, as any linguist will tell you.
These divisions, that American English and British English are “standard” and other versions of English are “non-standard” are based in colonial sensibilities and steeped in racism—the same reasons why AAVE is seen as inferior, or Haitian Creole.
