How Many Englishes are There?

The answer to the above question is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” (Thank You, Churchill).

There are at least 100 varieties of English spoken around the word. Maybe, more. They include:

• Indian English
• Jamaican English
• Nigerian English
• Singlish aka Singapore English
• American English
• Trinidadian English
• Australian English
• Philippine English
• Canadian English
  and the list goes on ad infinitum.

Each version has its own vocabulary, grammar and other idiosyncrasies.

Indian English is, of course, sui generis and something we all are familiar with. India is a multi-lingual nation and every Indian state has contributed to English. For instance, we owe pariah and coolie to the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

India’s contribution to English started long before our nation became a British colony. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest use of chowkidar in English as far back as 1696.

Today there are roughly 1,000 words that English has borrowed from various Indian languages.

Words like maharaja, ganja, dupatta, gulab jamun, kurta, anjeer, guru, mantra, sandesh, badmash, jute, manja, nirvana, lingam, paneer, maharani, dinghy, calico, dadagiri, bhelpuri, jati, karma, namkeen, natak, coolie, thali, anna, didi, pukka, shampoo, naxalite, pajamas, jungle, avatar, pundit, churidar, timepass, mongoose, bindaas, pariah, batata vada, rasgulla and hundreds of other Indian words have tiptoed their way into English over the last 350 years.

Indians have also come up with dozens of unique English expressions. Here’s a short list:

• Manager is out of station. (the manager is not in town)
• What is your good name? (a polite way of asking someone their name)
• The current went off, man. (the power is out)
• What-and-all did you buy at the market? (what items did you purchase at the market?)
• Where is my rubber? (In India, rubber means an “eraser” not a “condom” like in the U.S.)
• I watched Dhurandar twice for timepass. (timepass means something done just to pass time)
• Kindly do the needful. (please take necessary action)
• Can we prepone the meeting? (to move a meeting earlier)

I was recently introduced to Jamaican English by a review in the New York Review of Books of Diana McCaulay’s A House for Miss Pauline. Also, Jamaica holds a special appeal to me because of our shared colonial history: Many of our countrymen were dragged to the Caribbean by the British, during the colonial era, to work as laborers in harsh conditions.

Jamaican words like duppy (angry spirit of the dead) and buckra (originally white slave owner, now refers to a white man) are now part of my English repertoire.