Publications

Publication details [#60917]

Caldwell-Harris, Catherine, Srishti Nayak and Inder Singh. 2016. Familiarity, comprehension and use of Indian English only. L1 Indian English speakers’ psycholinguistic judgments and interview responses. English World-Wide 17 (3) : 267–292.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/eww

Annotation

Indian English only (IndE-only), e.g. “I’ll meet you here only”, is rejected as poor English by many IndE speakers. The present study used a mixed method to investigate familiarity, comprehension and use of IndE-only in 20 L1 IndE speakers in the US. Participants completed a psycholinguistic task comprising syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic judgments of IndE, standard English, and grammatically or semantically odd control sentences. L1 IndE speakers’ task performance was compared to a control group of 33 American English speakers. Results showed that IndE speakers were familiar with syntactic aspects of IndE-only consistent with the literature, and were able to extract significantly more information about implicatures and conversational contexts compared to the control group. L1 IndE speakers were also interviewed about their attitudes towards IndE and IndE-only. Qualitative results indicated that despite some stigmatization, mostly in the written form, IndE-only exemplifies the emerging identity of L1 IndE.